Hand in Hand
by GryphonFledglingOfSilverWings
Summary: 'He became a constant, like a tacky piece of furniture that cluttered up the corner and didn't match the rug. But it was familar and, like the actual tacky chair in the corner, she got used to him.' Rita/Raven, oh yeah. Rated for language.
1. Chapter 1

Life was good, Raven decided. The smell of clouds, the creak of the Fierta, Judith's midriff... so many things to live for. Closing his eyes and breathing in deeply, he leaned his elbows on the railings of the ship as it glided through the sky. Ba'ul rumbled above the rigging, the vibrations humming up the archer's arms.

"Couldn'a said it better myself," Raven agreed. Beside him, slouched lazily on a stack of crates, Yuri stretched and yawned. Repede was sleeping near his left foot.

"How much further to Capua Torim?" the swordsman asked. Brave Vesperia was running another of its many, many delivery jobs for the empire's reconstructions efforts, but was hard to see the landmarks from this high. Ba'ul rumbled again.

"About fifteen minutes," Judith called in translation from her perch up the past. Opening his eyes and tilting his head back, Raven caught a glimpse of the underside of her thighs. Yes, life was very good. She caught him ogling and winked. He grinned back, and then lowered his gaze to the horizon again. Judith had a way of making a wink look like an invitation and a death threat all at once. And Raven wasn't quite brave enough to find out which she actually meant.

"At least Kaufman's not going to be there," Yuri said, his blatant relief rather poorly hidden beneath an affected drawl. Boy wasn't too good at handling nervousness and his coping techniques definitely needed work. There were better ways to go about it than imitating a certain old man. The old man knew.

"Think the genius mage even remembers we're comin'?" Raven asked, popping his spine as he straightened off the railing.

"Estelle sent a letter a few days ago," Yuri said with a shrug, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. Rita was part of the delivery to Zaphias; she'd finally been lured away from the dark confines of her laboratory - seriously, who stayed inside when they were at_ Capua Torim_? - by the promise of the attention of the empire's greatest engineers for the next few months. But... that agreement _had_ been reached with her waist-deep in mana conversion research, so the odds of her actually recalling anything outside of spirits and the complete reordering of life systems were pretty slim.

"It is possible that she could have forgotten," Judith said, flipping gently down from the rigging and coming to stand beside Raven. "Don't startle her when you go get her."

"Me?" Raven wasn't proud of the way his voice cracked on the word. Repede lifted his head up from his paws and huffed disapprovingly. "Why do I gotta be the one to go get her? She's still gunnin' for blood after that whole bath fiasco."

Yuri smirked. Of course, he'd been glum for weeks and suddenly decides to find joy in Raven's pain.

It wasn't fair. It had been an accident. Really, truly, honestly. A really bad case of the stupids and a missed sign nearly leading to having his everything blown off. Barely three weeks ago. She'd likely planned a dozen different demises for him by now, all in slow, excruciating detail.

And just when he'd decided life was worth living. Damn it.

"Why can't you be the one ta get her?" Raven turned to Judith, trying to keep from whining. And failing.

"I need to be here to translate for Ba'ul," the Krytian woman said, smiling prettily, as if the idea of his imminent demise were funny. Tokunaga laughed out loud. Come on, it wasn't like he was doing anything else when Ba'ul went flying around.

Yuri didn't even wait for Raven to try to appeal to him. He raised a halting hand without even opening his eyes.

"I'm going to be busy loading up the equipment for the capital," he said. "Wouldn't want you to throw your back out, old man."

"It will also give you a chance to apologize," Judith chimed in, her hands tucked serenely behind her back.

Seriously, she had to be trying to get him killed. Maybe she wasn't really as okay with his flirting as she made it seem. Maybe she was trying to off him or something. Really? He could take a hint. She could just _ask_, instead of murdering him through neglect.

It had been an accident! He hadn't seen anything. He had been the one being wronged anyway. Why was everyone ganging up on him?

"Besides, we really wouldn't want you to hurt yourself with heavy lifting." Her smile was practically devious. Suckered in by a pretty face again. He should become something other than a chest-man. Go for something less obvious. Like ears. Or hair.

He eyed Yuri and his waves of black.

Raven shuddered.

Maybe not. Eyes. Yeah, eyes were good. Had to get close to see them, which put other things in the line of sight too.

Oh yeah, impending death. It wasn't even like he could try to sneak off when they landed. They'd leave him. They'd definitely leave him, and he didn't want to walk all the way to Zaphias on his own. He got lonesome every once in a while now. And for the first time in his life, it was okay to admit that to himself.

But still... death by fireball. He sighed heavily and cupped his chin in his hands. Might as well enjoy his last few minutes. Too bad Judith was out of his line of sight when he leaned forward like this. At least the sky was pretty today.

Ba'ul let out a trill, like laughter. Great, even the entelexia wanted him dead.

The landing was uneventful and the stream of workers carrying crates orderly. No chance to sneak away in any kind of confusion. Besides, Judith met his eye and wagged a finger at him.

"Keep an eye on him, Repede," she said, before turning and letting out a bark of unnervingly sharp orders down the gangplank. Repede turned a skeptical look on Raven.

Well, it wasn't as if he'd never died before. Raven hunched his shoulders and slunk across the network of decks, Repede trotting alongside him.

"We won't be long," Judith called after him, as if she were reassuring him. "Ten minutes. Go get Rita and we'll meet you back here, okay?" She gave him her sunniest smile, the one that made even Karol go weak at the knees.

Well, she didn't seem to think he was going to die all that immediately. So it was to be slow and painful?

The walk down the row to the Mordio lair was long and bustling with people who didn't care one way or the other if he was going to be mashed into tiny pieces, no matter how friendly their smiles. The door was locked and no one answered as he knocked; first timidly, then progressing all the way up to loud banging. Nothing.

Judith wouldn't accept that nobody was home. And Rita was known for her heavy sleeping. Casting a glance behind himself, Raven slipped his lockpick set out of an inner pocket. Repede looked unimpressed, but turned and sat down to stand guard as Raven set to work on the keyhole. The locks were better this time. She'd learned a lesson about home security, but it had been a long time since Raven had met a lock he couldn't conquer.

She was going to kill him.

The door squealed as it swung open and he flinched, half-expecting Rita to be standing just inside in all her fiery glory.

Nothing.

"Rita, darlin'?" he called cautiously, poking his head into the dark house. Seriously, the girl had shuttered every window. "It's just ol' Raven."

Nothing. Repede huffed and lay down on the warm bricks of the stairs outside, leaving Raven to enter the dragon's lair alone.

There was a light up in the loft. He set a hand on one of the bottom ladder rungs.

"Rita?"

Nothing still. He climbed up slowly. And froze at the top.

She was there, hunched over a contraption hooked to a multitude of clamps and sparking ominously. He could just see the twisted wires over her shoulder, past her knees that were drawn up nearly to her ears, with her feet propped up on the desk.

"That's no way for a lady ta be sittin'," Raven called out, most of his body still safely below the floor of the loft and his muscles tensed for any quick ducking.

"Since when have I cared about that?" she snorted, but that was it. She didn't turn to face him, just bent a mass of wire together deftly. No declarations of vengeance or ominous chanting. Raven ventured up to his chest.

"Took you long enough. I was beginning to get annoyed with your yelling. What're you doing here, old man?" she asked, still not looking back. She had her goggles down, he could see now, and she leaned forward on her stool. The back of her hair was sticking up, like she hadn't brushed it in a while.

"We're here ta pick ya up for Zaphias. C'mon, Rita, did ya even get Estelle's letter?"

"Of course I got it." That got her to turn around, her eyes huge behind the goggles. She always was affronted when her friendship with Estelle was called into question. "I just forgot it was today, all right?"

"Well, Judy's got Ba'ul outside now and she gave me ten minutes to come and get ya, but it's less than that now because it took me so long on your locks."

He waited for her to rise to the bait. She shrugged, then immediately snatched the delicate mass of wires from the clamps and crammed it into a leather bag laying haphazardly under her stool.

"Here, help me with this," she snapped, not unkindly, as she continued to pack the bag with one hand and shoved a toolbox at him with the other. Raven tilted at the weight, unexpectedly heavy.

"What have ya got in here, bricks?" How had she picked this up? Genius mage or no, she was a skinny little girl.

Why wasn't he dead?

"It's my wrench kit. The ones in the castle are never the right sizes." Rita was halfway under the table, shoving boxes out with her elbows and feet.

Still nothing about the baths. Or her door for that matter.

He was going to regret this. But this was going to kill him if she wasn't.

"Hey, Rita?" He staggered a little as she shoved a bag nearly as heavy as the toolbox into his hands. "I, uh, I just wanted ta let ya know that I was sorry."

She scoffed.

"Whatever, old man. I've gotten used to you guys breaking into my house by now." She shoved her goggles back and slung a strap over her shoulder.

Raven blinked.

"Wait, what? No!" He fumbled to catch another box thrust in his direction. Hadn't this girl packed at all? "That wasn't... You shouldn't be okay with people breakin' into your house. Cute girl living alone?"

"I can take care of myself," she said, incredibly bossy even as she rummaged through what looked like a sock drawer. "And like I said, between you and Karol, I'm used to it."

"That's weird, Rita girl. And really unsafe. Ya could be, I dunno, changing or somethin'."

"Think about it next time you break in then, you dirty pervert."

They'd been talking for over a minute and she hadn't hit him yet. Raven was pretty sure he was going to faint. His heart could only take so much stress.

"Come on," she said, suddenly bashing into his elbow with a second pack she had slung over her shoulder as she passed by him. "I really don't want to walk all the way to Zaphias if they leave us behind."

"Yes ma'am." This, they could agree on. "But that wasn't what I was sayin' sorry about." She was down the ladder already and he had to call after her. She barely looked up at him, instead picking an amazingly sure way around the stacks of books on the ground floor.

"What else did you do?" _Finally_, a hint of suspicion. It was reassuring even as it sent cold sweat down Raven's neck. Judy and Yuri would come looking for his body if he didn't come back, right?

"Uh, remember a few weeks ago when we were all at the baths?"

Her forehead wrinkled for a moment in recollection as she turned back to him.

"Yeah?"

It had been Nan's fourteenth birthday, Karol's idea to take her to the baths as a present, and Raven's idea to follow along and watch for a good laugh. Rita had just tagged along to make sure nobody got hurt. Or so she claimed. She'd sit in that water all day if no one dragged her out.

"I, uh, I'm sorry, y'know, about that... incident." Come on, old man, pull it together. You took out Alexei, you can handle one skinny teenage girl.

"Incident?"

Gah, the girl could out-freeze the Blade Drifts. He was shocked it was taking her this long to remember; she'd certainly chewed him out loud enough when he'd shown up wearing absolutely nothing in the girl's bath because the place was a damn maze. Really, if he'd done it on purpose, there would have been more than a beanpole of a sixteen year-old in the water. As it was, there wasn't time to explain before fire flew and Raven had decided that he'd wish Nan a happy birthday some other time. It had been lonely travelling back that time too.

"I didn't mean to, y'know, traumatize you or nothin'."

Her forehead cleared as realization dawned. Raven flinched. But Rita just scoffed and turned away.

"Please. It's not like you're the first man I'd ever seen naked. It'd take a bit more than your wrinkled old bits to scar me."

And just like that, she was rummaging through a trunk, leaving him stranded at the top of the ladder with his burdens. Raven tried to remember how one went about _not_ choking on one's own throat.

"Wh-whoa, wait, what? Rita girl, I'm appalled. Utterly scandalized. I had no idea you were that kinda girl."

"What kind of girl?" She looked back at him, all irritated innocence.

"Far be it from me ta judge, but really-"

"S-shut up," she barked, understanding finally dawning and bringing with it a positively luminescent blush. "I dissected a few bodies during research on the effects of aer exposure, okay?"

Memories of scalpels, ice and hard, hard tables skittered through Raven's brain. He shoved them aside along with several stacks of books as he tried to make his way down the ladder with all the stuff hanging off him.

"Whatever you say," he said, going for condescending acquiescence in lieu of mindless panic.

She threw a book at him. Gently. Her arm was somewhat encumbered. But that made everything okay.

"Really," she huffed. "Get your mind out of the gutter."

He realized that he wasn't going to die.

"They let you cut up naked dead men?" he sputtered. "How old were you?"

"Thirteen. Three days after my birthday, actually." She smiled, fondly, as if it had been the greatest birthday gift she'd ever been given. "Normally, you have to wait two years for the approval of the grants, but I got it in one."

"You waited _a year_ to cut up naked dead men?" Raven wasn't sure which was worse; his moral outrage or the flitting memories of bones sticking out of places they shouldn't.

"How else was I supposed to learn?" She slung yet another bag across her shoulders - she had at least three now, and it looked as though they collectively weighed more than she did - and straightened distractedly. "It was important research. You can't substitute the real thing."

So cheerfully oblivious. It bothered him.

She turned stern eyes on him then, snapping him out of any foggy thoughts.

"Well, are you just going to stay up there? I'm not going to wait for you." He was still stuck at the top of the ladder, not able to climb down with any of the boxes he had clutched to his hips.

"Forgive an old man his frailty, Rita darlin'."

She growled, but shucked off her bags and stalked to the bottom of the ladder.

"C'mon, before Judy leaves us behind." She lifted her arms and caught the first box of many that he lowered down.

Fifteen minutes to the dot from when Raven had left the boat, they were shambling back aboard. Rita had packed light in her whirlwind of activity... at least when it came to clothes and whatnot. Raven was pretty sure that she'd brought the equivalent of a small tool shed with her otherwise. And it was heavy. Really heavy. He was getting more of a workout lugging her kit than he would have loading the Fierta with the generator parts they were hauling. He would be sure to let Judy know. Heartless girl. Yuri was probably going to think it was funny too.

"Where's the squirt?" Rita asked, rotating her shoulders after she dumped her burden in an untidy pile on the ship deck. Raven was a bit more careful in setting his load down, afraid of her retaliation otherwise. Repede sniffed at the pile with cursory interest, then wandered back to Yuri's side, satisfied with his level of involvement.

"Cap'n's in Dahngrest with Flynn, being all 'tour guide'," Yuri told her as he yanked the last strap tight on a stack of crates. A small halo of relocated mages hovered nervously around him, wringing their hands pointedly at the "fragile" painted along the sides. Rita had already wandered over, bossy hands on hips.

"You're sure that's everything?" she demanded of the head workman. "Because I don't want to find out when I get to Zaphias that some idiot forgot the reduction coils."

"N-no. I mean, yes. Yes, that's everything." The poor man stammered. Raven felt his pain.

"All right then!" he called, drawing Rita's attention away for the brief second it took the other man to scurry down the gangplank. "All aboard!"

Rita barely seemed to notice her sudden lack of target. She shrugged and went to sort through the pile of boxes and duffels she'd brought with her.

"Wow, Rita. Planning on supplying the entire city reconstruction?" Yuri teased, going to crouch beside her and gingerly extracting a delicate hammer from where it had spilled from a box.

"Shut up. Last time I went to Zaphias, I had to make do with the stuff the blacksmith had in the back of his shop. It was barbaric!"

Raven let the bickering continue behind him as he leaned on the railing again, watching the ground drop smoothly away as Ba'ul lifted up.

"Did you apologize?" Judy asked, coming up beside him.

"Yeah."

"And you still seem to be in one piece."

"No thanks ta you, Judy dear."

"She's grown up a little in the past few months."

"Not too disappointed by the lack of violence, I hope?"

She smiled at him, serenely, betraying nothing. What he wouldn't give for a poker face like that.

At least he wasn't dead.

o-o-o

The two month anniversary of the fall of the Adephagos was coming up. Yuri apparently wasn't allowed to forget that.

"So are you all ready for the big party?" Tokunaga asked, lounging against the helm. Rita, of course, was taken aback.

"What party?"

"The empire's making up a new holiday," Yuri told her, eyes closed and arms tucked behind his head. "'Spirit Day' or 'Mana Day'. Something like that. They're making us heroes or something. Honestly, Rita, do you even read the stuff Estelle sends you?"

The old man chuckled as Rita sputtered something about being busy and demanded to know why no one had told her about this. At least they sort of found it funny. It just irritated Yuri. Zaphias itself was still cleaning up two months later, and while reconstruction was going well, this wasn't a time to just be throwing parties. They hadn't even found out about Rita's birthday until it was past. There were still people in need out there, she had said when Estelle had demanded they celebrate.

"Are you going, Yuri?" Judy asked while in the background there was the familiar sound of Raven's pain after he had said something stupid and Rita had hit him. Yuri shrugged.

"Estelle asked if you were," the Krytian continued. Yuri opened his eyes and saw her staring meaningfully at him. He sighed and closed his eyes again.

"The Lower Quarter is throwin' a bash too, if it makes ya feel any better," Raven interjected, his voice coming nearer, presumably to escape from Rita. "Hank was tellin' me about it last time I was in town. Think about it this way, kid, it's a good morale boost fer everyone."

"It's stupid, that's what it is," Rita said somewhere across the deck. Old man was lucky she hadn't chased him, even if he was still in range. Yuri opened his eyes to judge whether he was in line of any future fire. "It's not like we did anything special."

"Nothing special?" Raven's voice cracked in indignation and his accent slipped for a second. "Excuse me, genius mage, but what I did was damn incredible!" And then he was right back to posing dramatically, in what he probably thought was a heroic stance. He looked sort of like a thoughtful duck.

"It was either do all that or everyone died," Yuri growled. "No one else was doing anything."

"Which is why we're the ones becoming heroes," Raven articulated, as if Yuri was an idiot. "I dunno about you, but ol' Raven's going to enjoy himself for one night. I can't even hitch a ride without having to do work."

"Mmm, indeed," Judy said, humming to herself a little. "I'd like to have a night of rest and relaxation." Being the fastest mode of transportation for hire was beginning to wear a little with how often they were making trips.

"There won't be anything for you to kill there," Yuri told her, finally letting one side of his mouth quirk up. She smiled at him, more in response to his own smile than any sort of bad joke he might have been making.

"I don't know about that," she sing-songed gently. Yuri thought of a few particular nobles he'd had to meet with recently and who Estelle, who never said anything bad about anyone, had horror stories about. His smile grew wider.

"There ya go," Raven said, smiling softly himself. "Everyone will be back on the job with their hangovers the next day, ready to keep working. Ya just gotta accept your medal and figure out a way to get out of it next year."

"Plus, it'll make Estelle happy," Rita added, in a voice that made it clear what she would do if Estelle were ever made anything but happy.

"Okay, okay, I'll go to this party," Yuri surrendered, letting his eyes close again. "But only if they make sure to give Ba'ul a medal too."

Judy chuckled and Ba'ul hummed overhead.

* * *

><p><em>AN: And thus begins my first attempt at a legit multi-chaptered fanfic, rather than some sort of one-shot or collection. I've done multi-chap original, but fanfic... This is scary for some reason. _

_No promises on update frequency right now, seeing as how a) school is in session and thus butt is being kicked and b) NaNo is coming up and I'll likely drop off the radar for that entire month. But here you go. This is happening. Revel in some slow-burn Rita/Raven goodness!_

_EDIT: 10/13/11 - Just doing a quick edit because the lovely Lupanari pointed out my stupid mistake of forgetting Aspio was totally destroyed in-game. So yeah, that's been fixed. There might be some of this sort of thing. _


	2. Chapter 2

"This will be your workshop."

They'd apparently gotten the hint last time, Rita thought as she stood just inside the doorway of the massive room. She might not have had to bring quite as many wrenches as she did.

"This used to be one of the barrack bunk rooms," gushed the engineer giving her the grand tour, "but with the troop movements lately, it opened up and we made the space for you as quickly as we could." He went zooming in to shove aside the curtains and let sunshine flood over the arrays of tables and shelves. Rows of surveyor's equipment, medical instruments, and bottles of ink glittered in the light.

"Everything is state of the art," the engineer continued, flitting about the room as if he were a bird distracting a predator from its nest. She noticed that he didn't exposit on what sort of 'movements' had opened up the room.

She couldn't argue with him about the facilities though. The equipment here was better than Rita's own, it seemed, and that in itself was impressive. Most of the machinery still wasn't operational without their blastia – Really? She had to do all that conversion too? What had Witcher been doing all these months? – but the sheer scope was somewhat awe-inspiring.

Rita took two steps forward and set her bag on a table. The muffled thump of it echoed up into the ceiling arches.

"It's such an honor to have you here," the engineer said, bounding back over to her, but she brushed by him to open a panel on the side of a generator.

"Do I have running water in here?" she demanded, poking her head into the bowels of the machine. It was her design, she could tell, but someone had altered it. It would overheat the way they had it now.

"Yes ma'am. We don't have the heat pumps working yet though, so you can have to –"

"The heat pumps aren't working yet?" Rita whirled around fast enough to make the man jump. "Do you have the central heating system hooked up at all?"

"N-no, we're –"

"I sent over those plans over a month ago! It's going to be snowing in a few months. What _moron _decided that not getting the central heating system converted was a good idea? Do you know how much energy it will take to keep it above freezing in here? You're going to have to be putting bonfires in the middle of your rooms to keep warm!"

Rita whirled away from the cowering man and stomped to her bag, hauling a stack of crumpled files from its depths.

"Please tell me you at least have started."

"Well, what with the –"

Rita growled.

"Where is Witcher?" she demanded.

Rita ended up skipping the dinner thrown for the returning members of Brave Vesperia and she only let Witcher leave after she got a headache from his constant whining about how _he _was missing it. She hadn't really been planning on attending anyway, but now she had a convenient excuse. Estelle wasn't there – the princess was in Halure and would be heading back to the capital with Flynn and Karol in a few days – and so now Rita could hole up in her brand-new workroom without feeling guilty about disappointing her over social niceties. There was so much that needed to be done and it was just like nobles to want to be having a party despite that. Whatever. She didn't have time for that. She had to make sure they weren't losing fingers to frostbite in a few months.

Blastia had made everyone soft.

She didn't have time for the group of engineers that timidly came to fawn at her door either. She shoved blueprints at them for water wheels and defensive fences and asked more than once if they had anyone working on the heat pumps at all, but they smiled and bowed and said that all of that could wait, that she should enjoy herself until after the upcoming anniversary party, that it was such an honor for her to be there, that they were so looking forward to working with her. Idiots. If they wanted to help so badly, they should have been doing it before she got here. Finally, she slammed the door in their faces.

Judith found her eventually though. She rapped on the door with the back of one knuckle as she entered, not waiting for Rita to admit her.

"So this is where they put you," Judith said, closing the door quietly behind herself. "I didn't expect you to be down near the dungeon." It was hard to tell if she disapproved or not.

Rita snorted.

"It's quieter down here," she said

"Raven said he's going to tell Estelle you skipped out on dinner," the Krityan relayed mildly, examining the interior of the room with interest. There was a great wall of windows at ground level looking out into the courtyard, but it was dark out now and there were an impressive number of lanterns everywhere, casting shadows across glass vials and stacks of books. That was Rita's other big priority: get the castle power for lights. She'd already had a conceptual generator going at her house for weeks and weeks now, but apparently the nobility had decided that candlelight was more romantic. Or something. It was a fire hazard, whatever they thought.

Rita snorted and scribbled another line of notes in the margins as she examined the switches she had been working on that morning.

"Oh please. Yuri wasn't there either, was he?"

Judith just smiled and tucked her legs neatly under her as she sat down on a stool.

"I thought so," Rita said triumphantly. "So if the great hero himself gets to skip, so do I. It would just have been a lot of hot air getting blown around anyway."

Judy continued to smile and went back to inspecting the room curiously. The two of them sat in silence as Rita worked.

"I don't know how you deal with those people," the mage piped up after a while. Judith had obviously gotten tired of being ineptly flirted with. Seriously, those nobles' passes made the old man look suave.

"They're not so bad," Judith said, in a tone of voice that gave absolutely nothing away.

"It's gross. The old man's bad enough, but at least he doesn't drool all over you. Hand me that screwdriver. That one." Rita pointed to the table just out of her reach by Judith's hip. This room was too big. She missed the way her knee would knock into the edge of her desk whenever she turned at home because she had too many books and too much furniture for one room.

"They don't drool." Judith handed over the tool. "It does feel nice to be appreciated sometimes, you know."

Rita snorted, then bit her tongue in concentration as she tightened a screw.

"You would think they'd have more important things on their minds. Some of us actually had to do work for this all to happen."

"Oh come now, Rita, they're just grateful that we stopped the Adephagos. You might have enjoyed yourself tonight. The food was good. Raven stood up in his chair and sang a guild ballad." Judith tilted her head to the side and smiled thoughtfully. "He has a nice singing voice, actually."

"Useless lump was probably drunk, wasn't he? And he's exactly what I'm talking about! That ass has responsibilities and he's, what, gallivanting around with you?"

It was nearly impossible to pick a fight with Judith. She didn't change expressions from her gentle smile. "Estelle will be here soon. Just be patient."

Rita scowled and tightened the screw again. "I didn't ask about Estelle."

She twisted too hard and delicate thread of the fastener ripped itself out. "Damn it!"

She set the whole mess on the desk and took a deep breath.

"I miss blastia."

Judith just smiled.

"So do I sometimes."

Rita growled and whirled around to reach for her bag. It was out of reach though, just behind her. She had to stand up and take an entire step before she could flop back into her seat with the bag in hand.

"This place is too big. I'm going to have to rearrange everything. They should have let me set it up."

"They wanted to make sure you had what you needed."

"Do you know how much this grade of tool costs?" Rita asked, wagging the screwdriver back and forth between them. "This could probably feed an entire family for weeks. I could have made do with my own stuff."

"As I understand it, the princess specifically wanted you to have the best of everything so that you can work all the harder to help people."

The tips of Rita's ears burned.

"Estelle doesn't have any sense of scale sometimes."

"Mmm, sometimes she thinks she can save the world all by herself."

The Krityan didn't even try to hide the fact that she wasn't just talking about Estelle and instead tilted a knowing eyebrow at Rita. It was an expression she had picked up from Raven and it was kind of unnerving seeing it on the Krityan's perfect oval face instead of the old man's scruffy, tanned one.

"Whatever," the mage huffed.

That was the end of the conversation. Judith stayed for a little while longer, but she fiddled with things absently until Rita told her to stop. Rita didn't mean to bark quite as sharply as she did, but the Krityan didn't react. She just set the glass vials she had been examining back on the table gently and a little while later, she left. Rita ripped out another screw and ended up shoving the coils off the table and resting her forehead on the desk.

She missed her house in Aspio.

o-o-o

The members of the Brigade kept calling him 'Schwann', sometimes purposefully, sometimes absently. He corrected them every time.

_"Dunno who you're talkin' to, son. The name's 'Raven."_

_"Really, boy? Is it so hard to remember my name? It doesn't even have that funny 'sch' thing at the beginnin'. Honestly, who spells a 'sh' sound with a 'c'?"_

The reactions ranged from confused indulgence to outright frustration, but Raven didn't care. They were good men, all of them, but they wouldn't be able to understand.

_"Schwann's not here anymore."_

It would just be something they would have to get used to.

It was harder than he had let on to Brave Vesperia. He knew each of these men, had trained them and commanded them and practically raised some of them, and now he had to be a stranger to them. The hurt in Adecor's eyes came back every time Raven glanced over him, even if Raven smiled and nodded in greeting. The lack of recognition, the refusal to acknowledge a name they had carried and praised and preened over for so many years… He knew that it hurt. Oh, did he know. It was why he had been trying to avoid Zaphias for a while now.

As soon as he got himself sufficiently drunk at the dinner, the servants carried him back to his room – a new room, a guest room, one free of memories, instead of the plush, ornate prison that had been his captain's quarters – away from confused and angry eyes. It was quiet there. Too quiet. No creaking of salt-shrunk wood or snap of a campfire or breathing of other people.

He missed those.

o-o-o

Someone was knocking on her door.

"Miss Mordio?"

Being woken up was enough. Being woken up by a frantic banging and shouting at the door was too much. Finding out that she had fallen asleep on the wire coils and had a crick in her neck – and all the while there was someone still hammering on her door – was enough to royally piss off one Rita Mordio.

It took her two tries to get the lab door open. She'd forgotten that she'd locked it.

"Talk. Three seconds, or I blast you," she growled by way of salutation when she yanked open the door. Her fingers were already smoking.

The maid's eyes were already wide and panicked though; the sight of Rita's angry face just made the terror go up a notch. A single notch.

"You know something about electricity, right miss?" the servant blurted out. As if Rita wasn't at the castle, in private workspace, with a budget to rival the military's.

"Yes," was what she ground out, still blinking sleep from her eyes in order to aim more accurately.

"Please, miss, we need you." And just like that, the other girl grabbed Rita's hand and hauled her out into the twisting hallways of the palace.

"W-wait a second, where are we going?" Rita woke up enough to remember that Estelle had asked her to refrain from frying any of the help.

"It's Master Raven." The maid's little feet tapped delicately as she dragged the mage awkwardly along. Her grip was surprisingly strong. "The _guildsman_."

She said it as if it was a dirty word and by uttering it she were doing something deliciously scandalous. Rita ignored that for the moment though, her attention having been grabbed by the name of a potential target. She was still allowed to fry Raven.

"What about the old man? And quit pinching!" She sent a surge of heat out just hot enough to keep the girl's hand off her wrist. She could keep the pace just fine on her own, thank you very much.

"There's a doctor with him, saying something about 'electricity'. Forgive me, I thought maybe you could help."

Oh damn. Rita would have left the maid behind in her haste if she had actually known where the guest rooms were. Every damn corridor in the castle looked exactly alike once you got above where her workshop and the dungeons were. So she had to fume and rant behind the maid, who was alternating between twitching nervously and looking positively ecstatic at the whole happenings.

It wasn't just the doctor at the door to Raven's quarters. The Tweedles were there too, doing a terrible job of remembering that Raven wasn't Schwann anymore. It seemed like every other word was an awkwardly cut-off reference.

"I say, that's our commandi – our good friend!"

"Indeed. Let us in. Cap – this fellow could use our help!"

The doctor was a spidery little man who was simultaneously trying to block the Tweedles – insisting something about rest – and trying to get himself through the door – citing his credentials in a pleading voice. The doctor had two maids hovering anxiously as well, looking uncertain whether or not they were supposed to obey the doctor's barked orders or Raven's wheedling with them from inside to leave. Well, at least he was on the other side of the door.

Into the fray waded Rita Mordio.

"What the hell is going on here?" she demanded, whirling the doctor around and putting herself between him and the door. He looked her up and down.

"I'm sorry, but who – "

"Rita, darlin'!" Raven gushed at a deafening level, flinging the door open so fast that the Rita stumbled inside. She didn't have any time to react before a pair of arms smashed her to a thick chest and hauled her off her feet.

"Old man, you have three seconds to put me down, " she threatened, kicking at his knees. Three seconds was too long a time period for these people. And Estelle had wanted her to try counting to _ten_! "I will end you."

But Raven was still talking over her. Very loudly.

"So glad you're here, my dear!" he thundered, the noise reverberating through her cheek and nose where they were smashed against his collarbone. "Now the good doctor – " and then Raven swung Rita around just enough for her thrashing feet to catch the other man in the solar plexus, "- needn't bother his busy self."

The doctor dropped to the ground at the impact and the maids squeaked and leaped forward and Rita had just enough time to recognize that her ear was against flesh and warm metal before Raven took two steps backwards and slammed the door by her other ear. Had he always been so damn tall? Her feet dangled by his shins and she kicked at him again just as he abruptly dropped her.

It was the fact that she was still bleary from having been woken up that was to blame for the fact that she landed on her ass instead of her feet. Certainly not that she merely lost her balance at his unceremonious treatment or with the shock that Raven was wearing nothing but a towel.

"Clothes," she demanded before she even started to pick herself up from the floor. She'd known the instant the maid had mentioned a doctor that Raven had exposed himself - his blastia was glowing on his chest, even beyond the hand that he had clapped over it. She just hadn't realized just how _much _he had exposed.

Without waiting for his response – and ignoring his protests when he caught her movement – she stood and yanked the door open. The group at the door had become a small crowd in seconds and she glared at the shocked, eager faces.

"It's a measurement device for my research," she growled. "Leave him alone or you'll contaminate the results and I'll use _you _as a replacement."

The stunned dismay was incredibly satisfying as she slammed the door again.

"Idiot!" she hissed at him. "Why'd you drag me into this?" The veritable roar of confusion behind the door began to dissipate slowly even as she turned the lock. It let her ignore the rustle of fabric behind her. That had been more Raven than she ever wanted to see again in her life, blastia not withstanding. Her cheek was still warm from where it had been pressed against the sharp edges of metal.

"Awww, c'mon Ritaaaaaa, ya know I'm no good with that kinda confrontation!" He all but flopped onto her from behind. How could someone with arms that heavy make such a high-pitched whine?

She shrugged him off and whirled around, stabbing a finger into his – mercifully clothed, even if his shirt was unbuttoned – chest.

"You owe me. Big time. Got it?"

"Yes ma'am. I'm yours to do with as you please." He touched his fingers to his forehead as if there was a hat brim there. "My eternal gratitude to you, m'lady."

She snorted, crossing her arms and shifting her weight to one leg.

"So, what did you do? You kept it hidden for over a decade and what, you just forgot to put on a shirt one day?"

He frowned at her, practically pouting. His shirt was yellow instead of pink. He looked good in yellow. Better for his skin tone.

Geez, when had she turned into Estelle?

"Fer your information, I was enjoyin' a leisurely soak. Hygiene's important, ya know. Only in the imperial capital though, would they be rude enough to walk in on a man at ease." His hair _was _wet.

"You let your guard down that much? You're an idiot."

"I was relaxin'!"

"How long were you a captain in this very castle?"

"Hey, they respected me then. They knocked."

"And whose fault is it if they don't respect you now? I heard you were flat-on-your-ass drunk last night."

"Slanderous lies," he retorted, the indignity lost in how he was massaging his forehead against an obvious headache.

"Whatever. You're lucky I'm smarter than you." She turned to go.

"Wait!" His hand clamped down on hers before she could turn the knob and he loomed over her shoulder to press his ear against the door.

"What now?" She had her own headache beginning now.

"Ya can't go out now. They'll get suspicious!"

"Right, because it wasn't suspicious enough for you to haul me bodily into your room. I'm not a toy, you know. You're lucky I didn't blast you."

"Oh yeah," he said lamely, pulling his hand away rather abruptly and scratching at the back of his head with it. "Guess that could seem a li'l weird."

"A little, yeah," she snapped primly. "Just… lay low for a while, okay? And stay away from that doctor guy."

The 'doctor guy' was gone from the hallway when she flung open the door. Too bad. She'd wanted to have a talk with him. The Tweedles were lurking outside though and Rita brushed by them as they all but attacked their idol, spouting well-wishes, promises of aid, and tear-eyed confessions of devotion. Well, she just made up that last part. She was already down the hallway, well on her way to getting lost on back to her lab. She'd probably smushed the wire coils with her face the night before. Again.


	3. Chapter 3

The castle was boring without Estelle, Yuri had decided long ago. And now there wasn't anyone else either. Yuri would have taken Karol for company. Or even Flynn. But they were both with Estelle. Judith had escaped the greasy hands and gazes of the courtiers and was gallivanting about with Ba'ul. She hadn't even bothered to ask if Yuri wanted to come. Raven was doing his best to skulk about out of sight, because Yuri hadn't seen him in days now. Apparently someone had seen him though, because Yuri heard that the old man had made a spectacle of himself that Rita had to save him from. And Rita herself had chased Yuri out of her lab with a scalpel. Crazy dictators and otherworldly abominations be damned; Rita with that tiny blade and a murderous gleam in her eye was the scariest thing Yuri had ever seen. The point was that, in the end, there was no one to talk to in the castle. So he was sneaking out.

His progress was rather pathetically stilted by the way he kept peeking guiltily from behind pillars and underneath bushes like a member of the Dark Wings. Even though Estelle wasn't there to make him feel obligated to remain in the castle, there was still a lingering feeling that he was running out on something important. He would tell people he didn't care about what the nobles might say - and he didn't - but he cared what Estelle would think. And, even if she never said anything, deep down, he knew she wanted him to get to know her world as she had gotten to know his. And he didn't want to. He probably would never tell her that - because she'd get all upset and tell him to do what it was that he wanted to do, the way he always told her to make her own decisions. That was how she was. But he knew that somehow, in some way, she would be disappointed, and that didn't sit quite comfortably with him. So instead of just wandering defiantly out, Yuri crept along knowing that he shouldn't be.

Repede, on the other hand, seemed to feel no such compunctions, as he jogged carelessly through the streets, tail waving like a banner. The dog was drawing glances throughout the Noble Quarter that were almost an even split between disgusted - from those who couldn't see past the mixed breeding, scars, and pipe - and adoring - from those few who recognized him as part of the party that had saved the world. He didn't mind the attention and Yuri was grateful for it, because it kept any curious eyes focused away from himself. He was able to slide along in the afternoon shadows, away from the towers of the castle, and Repede even got his ears scratched by a couple of children turning a deaf ear to their nanny.

The shadows had become near-darkness by the time Yuri was standing before the fountain in the middle of the square in the Lower Quarter. It was smaller than he remembered. The square itself had piles of rubble still stacked neatly around the edges; waiting to either be picked up eventually or put back into the buildings the bits had came out of. The pump for the fountain bubbled merrily though Rita had seen to its repair personally, making sure that the mana conversion hadn t messed anything up and Yuri watched the night lights flicker on the choppy surface of the water for a while. He wondered when this had stopped feeling like home.

There had been banners put up along the windows of the houses around the fountain. White, the way all the decorations in the city were, for the big party. They glowed a little in the semi-darkness. Yuri stood alone for a while, though he knew the other residents of the Lower Quarter had seen him already. Nothing really ever went unnoticed here, which is also why he was still alone. Someone who knew him well enough had decided he needed to have time to himself. With a shake of his head at people who still insisted on looking after him, he ran a hand through his hair.

The light in Hanks window was lit, despite the hour getting late. Yuri nearly rapped at the door with his sword hilt, but caught himself at the last second and used his knuckles instead.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in," Hanks chuckled fondly as he opened the door. He didn't seem surprised in the slightest.

Repede huffed and made his way boldly into the house, but Yuri found himself hovering along an invisible line, like a wall, keeping him out. It wasn't Hanks; the man had the door wide open, beckoning with his hand. Yuri didn't know what it was - just a vague sense of wrong, like he didn't belong there anymore. He had to clench his fists, leather strap of his scabbard biting into his palm, before he could step through the doorway.

"How's life been treating you?" Hanks asked. He'd been eating dinner when Yuri showed up, with a bowl of soup and a half-drunk glass of cheap wine on the table. He set himself down in his chair somewhat gingerly. Hanks was getting old, Yuri realized. He wasn't going to be around for forever.

"Been wondering when you were finally going to drag your heroic ass down here to say 'hello'," Hanks continued. Yuri blinked, as if coming out of a daze, at the realization that the old man wasn't immortal. He wanted Estelle to be there all of a sudden, to talk to Hanks, to convince him to live on and be there, and just to get to know this man who had been there for as long as Yuri could remember. She'd met Hanks, but she didn't really know him. It felt very important all of a sudden, that she know him. But Estelle was still gone, not getting back for at least another few days.

"What can I say?" Yuri stammered out, trying to hide the sudden - seriously, where the hell had that come from? - rush of emotion. "I've been busy. Y'know, with reconstruction and everything."

"How they been treating ya up in the Noble Quarter?" Hanks asked the question as much to Yuri as to Repede. The dog had walked around in a circle a few times before flopping onto the warm wooden floor and he let out a deep sigh around his pipe.

Yuri shrugged.

"Like nobility." The way he raised an eyebrow and the way Hanks' grin quirked up a bit was all that needed to be said about that. "They can't all be Estelle."

"Well, they're clearly not feeding you well enough," Hanks said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to the tiny kitchen beyond the stairs. "Maria sent me a pot of soup. It's on the stove."

Yuri laughed, trying to shake off the uneasiness he was feeling.

"What, you getting too lazy to cook for yourself?" he teased, sauntering into the kitchen and ladling himself out a bowl of Maria's famous leek and potato soup.

"Had a little bit of a weak spell a few weeks ago," Hanks said from the other room. "Maria's been looking out for me. You know how she is." He said it dismissively, but Yuri clenched the ladle a little tighter as he hunched over the stove.

"A 'weak spell'? What's that mean, old man?" he asked carefully, trying not to let any anxiety through his voice. He stirred absently at the soup, waiting for a response from behind him. Hanks just chuckled.

"I'm not as young as I used to be, Yuri." His voice was fond and wise and weary. It was too much like Raven when the archer was trying to be all 'sage'. Is that how people really sounded when they got old? Yuri had gotten so used to an 'old man' who wasn't really old that being faced with the actual results of aging was foreign to him. He'd kind of thought that Raven had been making stuff up most of the time when he spouted out advice and stories, and that the stiff back and bad heart was all an act. Suddenly he wasn't sure anymore.

"It happens when you get old," Hanks continued. It was as if he was reading Yuri's mind. And he seemed irritatingly nonchalant about the whole thing. Now that Yuri looked about on his way out of the kitchen, he could see that the woodpile was getting low, the floor hadn't been swept in a while, and there was just a general sense of things waiting to be done. Things never waited to be done when Hanks was around. Yuri had learned that from him: to not let a problem fester. Yet here they were. Waiting.

It wasn't that he wasn't aware of Hanks getting older, he'd just never thought about it. Old folks had always been old and young folks were young forever. He hadn't had to watch the change before. He wondered what else he'd been oblivious about all these years.

"So what's with all that stuff hanging from the walls outside?" Yuri asked as he came back from the kitchen. His sword knocked awkwardly against his knee and then the table leg as he pulled out a chair and laid the weapon across his lap. Hanks chuckled around a mouthful of soup.

"Heh, I knew ya wouldn't like it," he said, washing his food down with a sip of wine. "And I don't care what ya say; we're having the party with or without ya."

"I just don't understand why everyone's doing this. I'm not that special." Yuri's soup was lukewarm and he wondered how long it had been sitting on the stove. He sipped it absently for a moment, and then looked up to find Hanks staring at him. He wasn't sure what the expression on the other man's face was, but it looked pretty damn close to disappointment. Disappointment and maybe some sort of indulgence that Yuri hadn't seen since he was four years old.

"We aren't doing this for you, Yuri. Sure, ya did what none of the rest of us could. But this isn't your party. It might be in yer name, but it's not about ya, or even really any of those kids. It's about how we lived one more day. We're still living." Hanks raised his cup in a little toast all his own.

"Besides," he continued, taking another swallow of the drink, "we've all be hauling rocks for the past two months. It gets kind of boring, ya know."

Yuri looked down into his own cup of wine and swirled it gently. A smile wanted to tug at the corner of his mouth, but he wasn't quite sure if he should let it. He knew this was a fight he wasn't going to win. He wasn't used to those.

"If that's all it was, I'd be okay with it," he muttered. "But that's not just what it's about. If it were, there wouldn't be any need to have us there at all."

"I didn't say ya weren't important, boy," Hanks declared, gesturing with his cup into another little salute. "You and Brave Vesperia were the ones who kept us all alive. Yer gonna begrudge us a little gratitude?"

"I don't like being drooled over," Yuri insisted, drawing his spoon through his soup in tiny spirals.

"Too damn bad," Hanks declared good-naturedly, scooping up the last dregs of his own soup. "Your face will see to it that you'll never quite get off without being noticed."

"What's wrong with my face?" Yuri asked, brushing a hand down his chin as if offended. "It gets me free alcohol."

This was a familiar game, one he could play because he played it all the time with Judith and Raven. This didn't require him to try to fit back into a niche he had outgrown, a cubby he couldn't squeeze into anymore. He could stretch here, run around, duck and weave.

"Exactly my point," Hanks said, gesturing with his spoon in little jabbing motions. He was still smiling, but he seemed to have sobered a bit. "People notice you, Yuri. They can't help it. You're one of the movers and shakers in the guilds now."

"I didn't ask to be." Yuri downed half his cup of wine in one gulp.

"Yuri," Hanks said, and that look of near-disappointment was back. "You might not have asked to be, but now you are. It's the lot that ya drew and you're stuck with it now."

"I was just trying to get things done because no one else was doing them."

"And now you're the one people are going to look at to get those things done," Hank said, leaning forward across the table. "You're the one people are going to get angry with if those things don't happen. You've got responsibilities now, boy. How does it feel?"

Yuri's scabbard's strap wasn't wrapped around his hand as he was eating and he found that he missed the way the leather would clench around his palm as he curled his hand into his fist beneath the table.

"At least now I know, so I don't screw things up any more. Someone letting me know would have been nice," he ground out. Hanks let out a quiet sigh and shook his head ever so gently.

"The world isn't that straightforward, Yuri."

"Well, it should be." Yuri set his spoon down next to the bowl and pushed himself to his feet.

"Take care of yourself, old man," he all but snapped.

"You too, Yuri." Hanks didn't seem offended in the least. Just tired. "Come down and see us again sometime, would ya?"

Yuri deflated a little. Why couldn't he just be allowed to stay angry?

"I'll see what I can do," he muttered, and then ducked out the door before Hanks could see that his cheeks were flushed with shame. Repede didn't follow him out and Yuri didn't call for him as he closed the door behind himself. The dog knew how to get to the castle and he likely was going to stick around for Yuri's leftovers that the swordsman had left on the table.

Yuri didn't look up at the decorations as he walked briskly back towards the Noble Quarter. He just stared at the ground beneath his boots, eating it up with his large strides.

o-o-o

She wasn't sure when he had shown up in the lab, but Rita turned around to find Raven standing next to her. She jumped violently and for a brief moment, her brain refused to work, having been forced out of the maze of letters and formula it had been traversing. And so she just sort of stared at him, trying to figure out just what it was that was wrong with him being there. Or who he even was.

"Good mornin'," he sing-songed the moment her eyes focused.

"What the hell, old man?" She shoved him. Hard. She wasn't going to admit how badly he'd scared her, but she sure as hell wasn't going to let him get away with it. She hadn't even noticed him coming into the lab, and that bothered her. Yuri had been in there earlier, but he had been irritating from the moment he had stepped into the room. He had been bored and a bored Yuri was a restless Yuri. He would clink his sword hilt along the pipes and lean against bookcases, only to push off again and rummage through interesting-looking piles of shiny objects. It had driven Rita crazy. He hadn't actually been messing with anything, but the constant stream of quiet noise behind her had set her on edge. At least Karol wasn't there. She didn't even want to think about that.

Raven on the other hand... She hadn't even known he was there. Now that she had noticed, she could hear the sound of his breathing, and the shuffle of his clothing as he moved, and because he was frozen in fear and she was glaring at him in complete silence, she could hear the quiet hum of his heart. It was odd that no one had realized that it existed before if she could pick up on it just like that. Maybe it was only because she knew it was there. Or had it gotten louder, the way a heart would beat faster? Rita wanted to get her hands on it regardless. Maybe she could talk him into letting her examine it. For science.

The thought had her whirling around on her stool, looking for a pen. But when she turned back, he was gone.

Not quite gone, as he was just out arm's reach, but he was looking at a book with interest, one hand coming up to rub at his chin. He looked up at her movement.

"I know what yer thinkin' and the answer is 'no'," he said quickly. "I'm in here to try and avoid bein' poked at anymore, thank you very much."

"Who's poking at you?" Rita's hackles went up. That blastia was her area, damnit!

Raven tilted his head at her and raised an eyebrow and she realized that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

"Maybe this was a bad idea," the archer said wearily. Rita huffed.

"Well, it _was_ one of yours," she growled, turning back to her work again.

And he went back to being quiet. It was unnerving at first, and she kept looking back over her shoulder at him. He seemed to feel it every time she glanced at him, his shoulders jumping up defensively even if he didn't turn around. But he didn't go skulking into a corner and he kept his hands folded carefully behind his head. And eventually, she almost forgot he was there.

"Do you ever miss home?" he asked suddenly about a half an hour later. She had been absorbed in a book, tracing her progress with her finger as she deciphered lines of formula, and she jumped violently when his voice came from right over her shoulder.

"Damnit!" she burst out, slamming both of her hands on the tabletop to brace herself from falling off the stool. "What the hell is your problem?"

His hands were raised defensively, but he didn't take more than a step backward to get away from her startled flailing.

"What the hell kind of question is that? What the hell are you still doing in here, anyway?" She growled in punctuation, letting the angry exhale relax her body, and glared straight at him. He shifted under her attention, weaving from side to side gently as if weighing his escape options, but he tsked gently.

"My, my, what language for a young lady."

"I don't give a rat's ass, old man," she spat, enjoying the double flinch - the first an exaggeratedly staged affair to accentuate his comment about her language, and the second genuine as she, yet again, called him 'old'. Never mind that referred to himself as 'old' more than anyone else. "Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"

She didn't miss the way his hand absently strayed to his chest at the mention of 'heart attack'. He didn't even seem aware of it as he gestured about dramatically.

"I was merely tryin' to extend the hand of friendship to the recluse, hopin' to draw her out into the light of companionship."

Rita snorted.

"No, you're not. You're trying to hide from everyone else. Who's the real recluse here?"

"At least I've got you, Rita darlin'." She would never understand how he considered that grin to be charming. It was a cross between a lecher's smirk and a showman's desperate toothy smile. It made it very obvious that he hadn't shaved in a long time, the way his finger made an audible rasp as it brushed over his chin.

"Whatever." She decided the best idea would be just to ignore him. Maybe if she stopped responding to him, he would stop asking questions, get bored, and leave.

It didn't work. He stayed by her shoulder, as if waiting for her to respond. She didn't notice at first, but when she finally did, it became more and more annoying until she glared at him out of the corner of her eye. He just stared back and they had a sideways face-off for a long moment. Rita was positive she could outlast him, but she had work to get back to, so she yielded gracelessly.

"Whaaaaaaat?" She dragged the word out into a snarl.

"Ya didn't answer my question."

"What damn question?"

"Do you ever miss home? Aspio, I mean."

She leaned back on her stool, ankles hooked around the legs so that she could bend her spine back until she saw the wall of her laboratory upside-down behind her.

"No," she declared firmly. Would he please go away?

No, of course not.

"Really? Didn't you, ya know, grow up there?"

She shrugged, still upside-down, and brought herself back up, feeling her stomach muscles clench to draw her back upright in a movement far easier and swifter than it ever had been before she left the City of Scholars. Her stool squeaked with the movement and the sound echoed through the rafters of the laboratory.

"It was just a place," she said, as much to herself as to him.

"Places can be important."

"Not to me. People can work anywhere they want to."

"Awww, are ya sayin' that home is where the heart is? I never took ya for that kind of touchy-feely girl, Rita."

"What?" Rita glared at him, not really angry, more just thinking about it like she never had before. "That's not what I said. It doesn't matter to me where I am. So long as I'm not surrounded by idiots," and she emphasized the word, but he just continued to grin and refused to acknowledge the jab, "I don't care where I am."

"And you've always got us," Raven said, linking his hands behind his head and looking away with a small smile. It was a much nicer smile than his grin. It made him look younger, despite the way it drew crow's feet in the leathery skin around his eyes.

"For what that's worth," Rita snorted, realizing that she had been looking at him for too long. "You're just a headache."

"Ah, I'm wounded by your cruel words, fair lady." His hand came up to rest over his heart and he pouted, small smile still there in the fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Rita found herself smiling too. She wasn't sure why.

And her work was still lying unfinished while she was being distracted by the senile old fool.

"Go away, old man," she said, mustering up the venom she seemed to have forgotten somewhere along the line. Stupid friendships and the stupid way they made her act all mushy when she was least expecting it. "You're distracting me."

She all but kicked him out the door. She even looked up and down the hallway, searching for a servant so she could rat out his location, but she had already done a magnificent job of ensuring that the castle staff avoided her as much as possible. So instead, all she could do was slam the door so that the noise echoed after his purple-clad back.

* * *

><p><em>AlN: I'll be the first to admit that this chapter took waaaaay too long. I rewrote it about three different times, with different pacing, different events, different everything. The good news is that I was able to save just about everything I changed and it will make its way back into the story when the time comes for it. The bad news is that I took forever and a day. I'm still not entirely happy with it and it's really super-long, but such is life. <em>


	4. Chapter 4

Raven hadn't been sleepwalking. In fact, he'd been far too awake for that ungodly hour. But for the unnatural life of him, he couldn't remember how he got to the lab that particular night. He'd probably been walking to the dungeons. The route was habitual. The hallways leading there were some of the only ones he could walk freely through without being molested. Had been for some time. But he'd seen a light under the lab door. Did she never sleep? Honestly, it wasn't good for a growing girl, genius mage or not. So he went in to check on her. Not because he was lonely or anything. Just 'cause.

And now, he had a sore arm for his troubles. He said as much, laying on the pout thick and saccharine. Rita just glared, drawing her arm back from having punched him. She looked tired, with rings under her eyes and a crick in her spine from hunching over the desk.

"I can take care of myself," she muttered stubbornly.

"Sure ya can, Rita darlin'," he said indulgently. Her glare narrowed at his tone, but she didn't react much more.

"What are you doing up, anyway?" she growled at him. It reminded him of a kitten. A grumpy kitten that needed more sleep. A lot more sleep. It was kind of adorable. In a 'still might end up clawing your eyes out if you get too close' way. He kept that to himself. His ability to ignore self-preservation instincts only went so far.

"Whatcha got there?" he worked up the courage to ask, leaning over her shoulder to see what she was squinting - hmm, that was something to keep an eye on - at on her desk. She brushed a hand over the blueprints as if trying to hide them from him.

"This has to be in to the builders in Aurnion in two days," she growled. Didn't even seem to notice that he had changed the subject without answering her question.

"Forgot about a deadline, did ya, genius mage?"

"Sorry if I have to be monitoring everything because no one else can draw a straight line!" The venom in her voice was enough to curdle milk, but more than anything, Raven was just surprised she was answering him.

It had become like this lately; her not flaying his skin off when he came into visit. 'Hiding' was what she would call his actions. He was too interested in the integrity of his limbs to argue the point too much with her. And there was a point. But lately, he had just been trying to see how much he could get her to engage him in conversation. Sure, most of the time it was just him shooting the breeze to only the breeze, and when Rita did respond, it was usually something scathingly unimpressed, but she would respond. The silence before had been surprisingly comfortable - inasmuch as the constant fear of her springing on him for breathing could be comfortable - but he was pretty sure that it had been because she was ignoring him. Now, for the past few careful days, she had been paying attention - sometimes - and still not kicking him out. It was intriguing and it was why Raven kept finding himself back in the frying pan every time the fires of the palace got to be too hot.

"So, what's it do?" he asked, attempting to get her hackles to lay back down. It was like reaching past the claws to the back of a kitten's ear; might reach it unscathed, might not, but it was too cute to resist.

"It's a water filter," she said. "The blastia aren't around to purify the water anymore, so that does it instead."

"Did you design this?" he asked, more to keep the conversation going than anything. He already knew the answer.

True to form, she snorted. But her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. He wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been standing just by her arm.

"Of course I did. There isn't anything in here that I didn't design," she said - just matter-of-fact, not bragging - and went back to her papers.

That actually surprised him. He took a step back from her shoulder and looked around the depths of the laboratory - the gutted-out barracks for an entire squad of soldiers - and took in just how many machines, gadgets and just plain unintelligible tangles of metal there were.

o-o-o

"You amaze me, Rita," came the old man's voice from behind her. She hunched her shoulders and whirled around.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she demanded. He had gone to sit on the rug that somewhere along the way had become his favorite place in the lab, his legs stretched out before him and all the rest of his weight leaned back on his hands behind him. He just grinned in the face of her scowl, his head tilted back to look at her, and that pissed her off.

"Exactly what I said, genius mage. All this," here he shifted to raise one hand and twirl a finger in a lazy circle, taking in the whole room, "and only sixteen? At sixteen, I could barely read."

"That's because you're an idiot," she huffed. He didn't react though and that made her squirm a little in shame. Estelle had gotten to her. Again. She was never going to get the hang of tact. She knew she was amazing - it came with being a genius, after all, but the way the old man was still grinning made her want to punch him in the face. Why didn't he get angry when she said stuff like that?

"All it takes is a good work ethic," she tried again. "Not that you would know anything about that."

He was still grinning, but he tucked his arms behind his head and laid down where he sat, hiding from her glare.

"That hurts, Rita darlin'." And she couldn't tell if it did or not.

"Don't call me 'darlin'," she ground out, glaring at the chin whiskers that were all she could see of his face at that angle.

"Eleven years of service, workin' undercover for the knights an' the guilds alike? Keepin' the peace an' helpin' take down Alexei" - she didn't miss the way he still snarled the name - "ya say I have no work ethic?"

"Someone was making you do that," Rita said, hooking her feet on her stool legs and leaning forward, as if that could make him feel her glare that much more intensely. "But look at you now."

He raised his head ever so slightly to meet her gaze, one eyebrow raised and his grin fading slowly. Rita nearly faltered, but she gestured at him, still sprawled out on the floor.

"Even if you're not Schwann anymore, you command the respect of that entire band of knuckleheads. Both the empire and the guilds are in your debt. You know more about... everything than everyone but me and yet you're just laying there like a fat cat."

"Meow," was his response to that and he let his head fall back to the rug.

"Don't you even care? We've got a whole world to rebuild and you're just as bad as those nobles and their stupid holiday."

"What is it with you and Yuri and that party?" she heard him mutter, and then his voice picked up. "It's not stupid, genius mage. Just think of it as a socially-acceptable opportunity to tell everyone about how amazin' ya are."

"Like I care about that."

Even though she couldn't see his face, she knew he was laughing at her and that made her bristle. But it faded quickly and she shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed, letting her feet down to swing absently below the stool.

"I'm tired, Rita," he said finally, pulling out one arm from under his head to lay it over his eyes. "I just want to enjoy this time off. It's the first vacation I've had since I died, so I'm gonna take what they give me, all right?"

There was a moment of silence and she wasn't sure how to break it. So she just stared at the wide brush of hair that was all she could see of his head. When it was finally clear he wasn't going to say any more, she turned back to her desk.

"Estelle's coming back tomorrow," he said almost immediately.

o-o-o

He heard her elbows thump on the surface of the desk as she jumped and he couldn't stop the amused smirk from skittering across his face. She'd forgotten he was there already?

"Oh," was all she said though. He tilted his head back and took in the way her shoulders were hunched as she leaned over her papers.

"'Oh'? You haven't seen the princess in weeks and all you have to say is 'oh'?"

"She's not going to get here any faster if I get excited," she huffed, almost muttering.

"But you are excited?" he prompted, seeing the way her neck retreated even farther into the collar of her jacket.

"Shut up, old man," was all she bit out at him.

Interesting. He watched her for a moment, and then put his head back down into the cup of his hands.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up.

Rita was gone; the lab feeling far larger and echoing quietly in the vacuum of her absence. A peek out the window confirmed that the princess wasn't there yet - it was barely dawn and the servants were still out unrolling carpets down stairs and through courtyards in preparation - so Raven stretched and tried to wander a little.

Without the mage in the room, it was quiet. And dark. Her generators were sitting in a corner, waiting to be hooked up, but until then, the lamps were all out. It was a strange juxtaposition; that conscientiousness for fire hazards, and Rita's pyromaniac tendencies. The end result, though, was that Raven succeeded in bashing his knee twice and then clipping his little toe on a table leg. All his hopping and cursing did nothing to liven up the room. Without any of her bustling activity, Rita's lab felt dead. Forgotten.

And then Raven discovered that he was bored. Well, not discovered, just more remembered. It was something that he'd always found about the castle. It was boring, no matter if you actually had a task to do or not. It was even worse when you were trying to get out of that task because, even though you'd pick up every little thing to do to avoid it, none of those were exciting either. So Raven found a candle - catching his shin on a stack of books in the process - and began to rummage.

He couldn't help it. It'd been his job for the past ten years, seeking out any juicy tidbits that might help his higher-ups along, and old habits die hard. Plus, he was just nosy by nature. He could admit that about himself. And Rita had some very interesting documents. Did Ioder know that she had his medical records from the past five years? That was his royal seal at the bottom, so it looked like it was all on the level. Raven skipped over the particulars out of respect for his monarch - sure, he was nosy, but he wasn't a spy anymore - but it was still rather intriguing that Rita had them. What was she planning on doing with them? And, Raven thought with a start that had him pushing the folder back into its drawer and then skimming along the labels at the tops of the others, what did she have on him?

And so Rita found him twenty minutes later, cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of files. He'd pulled out anything that looked remotely linked to his blastia and was digging through them, searching for... he wasn't sure. Something incriminating? Something hopeful? He honestly didn't even know as he raised his head to meet Rita's gaze. The mage had kicked the door open, her arms full of various sizes of pipe, and she stared at him as if he'd grown another head.

"What. The hell. Are you doing." None of it was a question. The pipes clinked in her arms as she shifted dangerously.

He probably had, right at the beginning, invented some clever response to keep himself alive if the mage came in, but that was no longer relevant as he was now knee-deep in her classified documents. So instead, what came out of his mouth was an eloquent "Uhhhh..."

She was hindered by the pipes in her arms at first and by the fact that she clearly did not want to destroy any of the papers he was surrounded by. That she didn't indiscriminately start throwing fire around was in and of itself spoke of the control she had developed since he'd met her. But none of that stopped her from making his life quite the living hell for all of thirty agonizing seconds.

"Ah, Rita that... Ow! C'mon, I-"

He ended up on top of a ladder, teetering dangerously, in front of a bookshelf filled with books that looked very old and very expensive. His jacket was smoking ominously and he knew that his eye was going to bruise in the morning if he didn't get a healer to look at it. Rita had her circles in place, the magic making the air crackle, but she was hesitating, her eye on the volumes just behind him.

"Talk, old man," she growled. "What were you doing?"

"If ya'd let me get a word in edgewise, Rita dar-" He cut himself off just short of the endearment. "Ya weren't here, so I thought ta myself, y'know, that ya could use a little... help reorganizing?" He was out of practice, he could tell, the way his voice made the last few words a question instead of a smooth lie. Dammit.

o-o-o

Rita had advanced far enough on the slimy little weasel that she was standing among the piles of paperwork he'd left on the floor. She glanced down at them, taking in what he had been working on. With an angry, loud sigh, she dropped her arms and the circles dropped. A small questioning noise came from the top of the ladder where Raven was cowering with his arms over his head, but she ignored it. Instead, she bent down and picked up one of the files, thumbing through it to be sure of what she already knew.

"What the hell is this?" She waved the folder around viciously, scattering papers everywhere and not really giving a damn. "What's going on?"

"Nothing!" came the desperate reply from behind the purple-covered arms.

"There's something wrong with your blastia, isn't there?" Why hadn't he told her? Why did he always have to do this?

"No!"

"Shut up! There is and you're being an idiot and not telling me. Is this why you've been hanging around? So that if you just up and pass out or something, there's someone who knows what they're doing? Why didn't you just ask me for help?"

His hair emerged from his arms, the unruly ponytail being used as a safety probe. When it wasn't blown off, his eyes came up.

"Aww, ya worried about little ol' me, Rita darlin'?"

"Of course I am, you imbecile."

That, for some reason, seemed to surprise him.

"Whaaa?"

"Now, get down off the damn ladder and let me take a look at it."

"Rita, there isn't-"

"Now!"

Occasionally, he managed to impress her with how limber he really was. In less than a second, he was on the ground, a palm defensively over his chest. Rita marched up to him, ignoring how he flinched, and smacked his hand away.

"Hey!" This time he put both hands over his blastia and turned away slightly from her. "I'm tellin' ya, there's nothin' wrong with it."

"Oh really? Then what were you doing in my laboratory, reading about your blastia, huh?" She poked and prodded at him, trying to pry his arms away from his ribs.

o-o-o

Rita had bony fingers. Raven was definitely going to have bruises. He curled into himself, trying to minimize the flesh she had access to.

"Ow, ow, ow," was really all he could get out. That wasn't what she was looking for and so, instead of laying off like a normal person so that a man could catch his breath, she just poked harder.

"Speak up, old man. I'm waiting."

"Ow. Would you quit that?" He slapped blindly at her hands. Bad idea, as the movement gave her the opening to seize his wrist in a grip tight enough that he gasped. Her fingers were strong, surprisingly so for how tiny they were. And she caught him enough off-guard that she pulled him around to face her.

"If you had a problem, you should have just asked me instead of wasting all this time, old man," Rita ground out between clenched teeth, her nose shoved right up into Raven's face. "Here I thought that you were just lonely and so I was just humoring you, but if you're looking to just snoop around behind my back, you should stay the hell away from me, understand? I don't have time to deal with your nonsense. So what the hell?"

Raven told her the truth. That he was just doing stupid old man things because he was a stupid old man. Also, that she was overreacting.

She didn't set him on fire. That surprised him. After all, she normally didn't take too kindly to having her temper pointed out to her. Instead, she grabbed him by the lapel and shook him just firmly enough to freeze him into submission.

"Yes, you are a stupid old man," she hissed at him. "But because I don't believe a word you say about your blastia, I am going to let you stay here. That doctor guy kept cornering me in the hallway and asking where you were. He's an ass and he can squirm for all I care, but he got me worried."

Rita? Worried? About him? Raven was pretty sure that she would strangle him if he started laughing now. But he was saved by a knock on the door and a servant girl poking her timid head in. Rita whirled on her, not letting go of Raven's jacket.

"What?" she barked. The girl blinked once, frozen in panic.

"The princess is arriving," she forced out. The original announcement was likely supposed to be something a bit more formal, but Rita just growled and the girl vanished from the doorway. The mage let go of Raven's jacket with a motion that was almost a flourish, and raked a hand back through her hair. Without a word, she started towards the door, as if she'd forgotten he was even there.

Raven hesitated, hands still stuck in their half-raised position of meager defense. She was all the way to the door before he felt safe enough to straighten out of a crouch, but the instant he moved, she whirled on him.

"You," she said, jabbing an inexorable finger at the mess on the floor, "you are going to pick this up because I sure as hell don't have time to."

Then she whirled on her heel and stalked away from where he stood frozen, slamming the door behind herself.

o-o-o

He heard her before he saw her, lost as she was in the sea of ridiculously expensive fabrics and flower petals.

"Yuri!"

Estelle broke out of the formation of nobles - probably ruining days of choreography for her return climb up the marble stairs of the castle - and ran up to where the swordsman was slouched against a railing. He caught her just as she jumped up, and it was only a quick, sure placement of his foot and the slightest grip of Judith's hand at the back of his vest - a saving motion that they were both going to pretend didn't happen - that kept him and his armful of princess from plummeting down the entire length of steps. There were slight murmurs and a few hapless organizers milled about, trying to decide whether it would be better public relations to get the princess back into line, or to let her greet Brave Vesperia, the saviors of the world.

In the end, Yuri didn't care much. Estelle's hands gripped at the back of his vest and she squeezed him with her constantly-surprising strength. He held her too close for too long a moment, and then moved his hand up to her pink hair.

"Well, hello there, princess. Two weeks have been an eternity, haven't they?" he asked, looking down at her with a smirk. She tilted her face up to him, her cheeks lit up in a light flush.

"W-well... I missed you," she said, almost bashfully, but her arms didn't leave his waist. His smirk softened into a smile to match hers, and he carefully extracted himself from the embrace. Repede huffed in disgust and scratched at his ear lazily before moving unobtrusively to the side so he couldn't be reached.

"Rita missed you too," Yuri said, pushing her towards the mage, who was all but succeeding in melding herself with the railing.

"Rita!" Estelle squealed, as if she hadn't seen the mage in years instead of months. The look on the other girl's face was somewhere between excitement and physical illness, but she made her way forward - with a not-all-that-subtle shove from Judy - to receive her own Estelle-hug. She returned it awkwardly, but at least her face loosened up a little over the princess's shoulder. Yuri just grinned at her, and turned to meet Karol who came barreling up the stairs.

"How's it going, Cap'n?" Yuri asked, grinding his knuckles onto the boy's head. "Didn't give your babysitters too much trouble, did you?"

"Owww, Yuri, cut it out." Karol swatted the offending hand away. "You're just jealous because I got to go with Estelle and you didn't."

Estelle pulled away from Rita and looked at Yuri, but he just waved a hand dismissively at Karol, not meeting her eye. "And you're just jealous because I got to go with Judy all the time," he said, ruffling the boy's hair again.

"Ugh," Yuri heard Rita mutter under her breath. The mage was looking to try to sneak away again already, but Estelle had her hand trapped in a gloved grip.

Judy inserted herself into the conversation then, leaning in to wrap an arm around Estelle's shoulders; practically cool as compared to the others.

"Glad to have you back, Estelle," she chirped. Of all of them, she'd been the one to see Estelle the most frequently, what with all of her errand-running. Her and Raven. Speaking of which, where was...

"Were ya all gonna forget about ol' Raven?" came the old man himself, sauntering in as if he were on time, but clearly out of breath from running from where ever he had been.

"Raven! I didn't know you were going to be here!" This time it was Raven's turn to be assaulted by a mass of pink hair and blue fabric. He was actually far more prepared than Yuri had been and Estelle laughed as he swung her around like a little girl.

"Careful, old man," Yuri cautioned. "You'll hurt yourself."

"Awww, reunions make me so happy though." Still, the archer set Estelle carefully down on her feet and made a bow far too elegant to be encased in his scruffy purple jacket.

"Glad to see yer doin' well," he said, brushing Estelle's knuckles across his lips in a manner they both managed to make look natural, rather than just some stupid noble greeting.

"Cut it out," Rita growled from the other side of Judith, where she'd escaped to after Estelle had let go of her hand. That drew the princess's attention back to her again though, and she ended up firmly latched to Estelle, who began bubbling excitedly. She seemed to have entirely forgotten how the welcome procession was still waiting for her to return, unsure of what to do next.

It was Flynn - of course Flynn was the only one with any brains - that came over and bowed politely in front of the group.

"Excuse me, your highness," he said, head at the perfectly appropriate angle of respect, "but if it would please you, there is the small matter of getting everyone inside."

Karol opened and closed his mouth dumbly and began to slink back to his place in the procession. Estelle blushed ever so slightly as she looked over Flynn's shoulder to behind him, but she just nodded and bobbed her assent.

"Please, Commandant," she said, just loud enough for all the nobles to hear, "forgive me. I merely had a moment of excitement at seeing my companions - our lands' saviors - once again."

Yuri flinched as the nobles let out a little cheer. But it made the murmurs stop and Raven caught Yuri's eye to gave a little nod. Stupid old man knew even better than Estelle how to play the crowd, no matter how much he knew Yuri hated it. But Estelle squeezed Yuri's hand before she left him behind and though she walked back with her back held rigid and her hands folded demurely, he could see the way her chin angled up like it never had before. She might be acquiescing to their stupid demands, but it was because she had decided to do it. They weren't going to be able to make her do anything she didn't want to again.

Him, on the other hand...

"Ready for the party, boy?" Raven asked, turning to Yuri with a grin.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Mmph. Another long gap between chapters and another mostly-bridging chapter. Important stuff went down here, but plot-wise, I realize it seems rather meh. _


	5. Chapter 5

The dress itched. Nevermind that it showed off far more of her collarbone than Rita thought should be legal, or that the skirt kept tangling up in her legs and making it hard to walk; the damn thing itched. It caught her sweat in a dip right in the middle of her spine, where she couldn't reach it, and because there were hundreds and hundreds of people packed into the ballroom - even the biggest one in the castle, even - like sardines, it wasn't as if she were going to stop sweating any time soon. So it continued to itch.

Rita wanted to go home. Even just back to her lab. She hadn't been back in there since Estelle had arrived at the castle. The minute the princess was back into the corral of the nobles, Rita had tried to escape. She was happy to see Estelle, of course, but she wanted to get back to the safety of her vials and burners. It wasn't that she was scared - it wasn't a retreat - but there were way too many people around.

But Estelle, being Estelle, was being so damn nice and introducing Rita to people the mage already knew and just generally being her friendly social self that Rita couldn't just abandon her. Estelle had learned a lot since the day she'd followed Yuri and Karol into a strange hut to proposition a feared mage, but she was still kind of naive. Rita wasn't about to leave the princess alone with the hungry looks that were being shot across the greeting halls.

It was worse in the party itself though. While the princess had been pretty off-limits in the greeting halls, now it was expected that you could have the princess to yourself for a period of conversation or a dance. And there really wasn't anything Rita could do about it. Especially because she herself was in demand as well. By stupid people.

"No," she growled emphatically for what felt like the twelfth time, gesturing emphatically with a skewer that she wished was longer and sharper. "There are more important things to be doing than spending money and time on a house from something that doesn't even have a body."

The noble at whom she was vaguely stabbing looked scandalized, drawing his wineglass up into his cravat as if it were a child he were trying to shield from her.

"But surely, Miss Mordio, you of all people recognize the contributions of the spirits in the saving of the world."

"Yes." She was gnawing another skewer, the tip of it bobbing up and down in the corner of her mouth. "And I, unlike a lot of other _people_, have had the opportunity to discuss this with them and they have said themselves: they didn't help us defeat the Adaphagos so that we could let people starve in the war zones while we built monuments."

The small crowd of spectators was spreading itself out wider in perimeter to keep away from her so she sharply bit down on the tongue-lashing she had fully intended to lay out on him. Estelle would have been proud of her self-control. The noble himself didn't seem to notice.

"So you've spoken with the spirits, have you?" he continued, even as he pressed himself out into the perimeter of the ring. The bodies were fencing him in, so he couldn't make a dignified retreat.

"Yes, yes I have," Rita said. "It's not that I have an issue with the sprits getting a monument. They deserve it more than half the old dead guys that have statues of them in the capital city alone." That caused some commotion, but it didn't alleviate the knot in her stomach. "But they have the whole sky to live in, crystal caverns, and every drop of water there is. They don't need any cheap little house we're putting up using things we dug out of their own homes."

She was done with this. She had sweat pooling in the curve of her collarbone too and it was almost as itchy as the spot on her back. So she snatched one more kebab from the server who was squashed next to her and then pushed her way out of the circle. The heels they had put her on felt too flimsy to properly stomp in and she found that without that solidarity, she was getting more frustrated than angry. Frustrated because she couldn't get angry without breaking something.

Then she saw Raven across the room, looking at her. Again. She had been trying to ignore him, trying to keep her temper in check in public, but the old man had clearly been staring at her. And worse, he was pretending as though he wasn't. The minute she caught his eye, he rubbed the back of his finger down his nose, as if he had been picking something off his face. But he'd definitely been watching her. And she needed someone to go after.

o-o-o

Yuri happened to look over at the exact moment Rita homed in on the old man and with minimal shoves, he was able to reach the mage before she reached Raven.

"Rita! There you are!" he called, catching her by the shoulder as gingerly as he could manage. He had thought that he didn't like nobles, but Rita was clearly a mess; breathing hard, almost panting, and she was damp with sweat.

"You look good," Yuri blurted out as her death glare swung from Raven to him at the contact. She did look good. Really good actually. Like an actual human being instead of a creature of science. Her hair was up in a braid thing and her dress was pretty, but she looked like she was expecting a monster to pop out any time. He'd never seen her this panicked.

"Do you want something?" she snapped at him. He wasn't offended. As she spit out the words, her stance shifted a little from murderous rage to something a bit more borderline. It was a fine line of distinction, but it was one that you learned quickly around Rita. For now, he was safe. Yuri threw a quick glance over his shoulder, disguising it as reaching for a glass of champagne for Rita, and the old man had disappeared. If Raven was good at anything, it was hiding from things he didn't want to deal with.

"It's hot in here," he said, handing her the drink. She gulped it down in one vicious swig and then handed the glass back. Her hands went to twist in each other, fingers pulling at the fine silk of her gloves.

"You okay?" he asked. It was a dangerous question with Rita, but he didn't really know what else to say. He wasn't as brave – or stupid – as Raven to make some stupid joke that would calm her down.

"People are really stupid," was all she said, her voice so low that he almost missed it. "The spirits can't just fix everything. They aren't gods." She ground out the last sentence and dug her palms into her eyes, the kebab she was still holding waving above her head like an antennae. If he didn't know better, he would have thought she was crying and trying not to cry. While she wasn't looking at him, Yuri threw another desperate glance around for Raven. He might have been trying to save the old man's life, but Raven seemed to have clicked with Rita lately. At the very least, she hadn't killed him in all the time he'd been spending in her lab, so presumably he knew how to deal with her. But the old man was now most definitely hiding and Yuri turned back to Rita.

"Is that what that guy was saying? I thought he was asking for your hand in marriage or something. You looked like you were going to kill him."

"Stupid people making assumptions about things they don't understand," Rita just muttered. She glared into space for a long time, then she shoved the kebab into her mouth and pulled all the meat from it in one crude swipe. With her mouth full, she pointed the skewer at Yuri and wagged it disapprovingly.

"Where's Estelle? I thought you were supposed to be watching her."

"Judy's got her right now," Yuri replied, risking taking his eyes off Rita for a moment to find Judith. The Krityan was creating a strange paradox as she attracted men by the droves, but also somehow managed to keep them at bay with her mere presence as she chatted with Estelle, keeping the princess safe for a few dances. Yuri had asked the Krytian's help after Estelle had told him that it would be rude for her to dance the entire time with him. Not that he minded all that much about the not dancing. He wasn't any good at dancing, but he had been trying to keep her close to him for a while where no one else could touch her. He had known she was a princess, but with so many people fawning over her he sometimes felt like he didn't know her. Just getting to hear her laugh with him for a while made him feel better, even if it was selfish. But Judy would keep her safe and even if he couldn't see the old man, Yuri was pretty sure Raven had an eye on the princess too. Karol was fancying himself a bodyguard and was glaring suspiciously at everyone. At least, glaring as suspiciously as the kid could manage while being the favorite of guild member and noble alike.

Rita, on the other hand, looked almost skittish, one hand clutching at one wrist as if to hold it back. Yuri wasn't sure if he was supposed to try to comfort her or not. There wasn't an enemy for him to point her at, which was his normal response to seeing her uncomfortable.

"Go keep an eye on her," Rita said quietly. "Keep anyone from bringing up this stupid temple idea. She doesn't need another thing to worry about. And she looks tired. Damn nobles have been bothering her all day and she just got into town and there's this stupid party tonight."

She was rubbing her hand up and down the length of her arm, her glove slowly crunching down her arm to bunch up at her wrist.

"Pretty lame party, I know," Yuri sympathized. That there was someone else who hated the party as much as Yuri did made him feel that much better and that much worse. Better because it meant that there was someone he didn't have to pretend to be having fun around, just in case it got back to Estelle. Worse because he couldn't get what Hank had said out of his head.

There were nobles standing up to give speeches about how citizen and guild member alike had banded together in difficult times. There were talks of Aurion becoming its own state, free of empire and guild influence alike, as a sign of moving beyond such polarization. There were doctors speaking about medical progress, and charities talking about how generous the human spirit was. Estelle and Ioder hadn't said a word other than to stand and welcome everyone. None of the members of Vesperia had been called up to say anything. This wasn't about them, wasn't about him. He knew that. He hadn't been... expecting anything? Had he? He wasn't sure what he had been expecting. Probably some gaudy parade or something, with everyone asking him to kiss their babies. Or to be shunned like some kind of pariah, like the murderer he had been.

It really hadn't occurred to him that he would just... be there.

o-o-o

If anything was more telling about who actually wanted this party to happen, it was that it wasn't Estelle or Ioder but instead some other high ranking noble that stood on the dais to make the big address for the night. Duke Balleria, a former general and now a self-professed voice of the people, kissed Estelle's hand and bowed to Ioder as he was waiting for the applause to die down. Rita had seen him around the castle before and he had once tried to come into her lab, but Raven had been able to run him out. One of the old man's few useful moments.

"Friends," he began, the voice that obviously was used to being heard echoing over the heads. "We are gathered here to celebrate life. We are gathered here to celebrate being alive, thanks to the brave actions of a few special individuals and the amazing power of our planet's life force."

Rita growled and ground the heel of her hand against her eye again. Another one of those already? Seriously, these people and their obsession with the spirits. Rita appreciated them, she really did, but they were still enjoying the newness of not being bound to a single spot as they had been in their physical forms. Instead, they were now practically omnipresent with their element throughout the world. They were not going to be offended if the statues to honor them were not raised immediately, or even for hundreds of years. It had only been a few months and already it was clear that the spirits did not experience time the same way the humans or Krytians did, or even as they had as Entelexia. A little recovery time for everyone was not going to phase them.

"-individuals who did what had to be done for the good of everyone." Was he still talking? She was trying really hard to ignore him. She just wanted this thing to be over so she could go fall asleep on her desk. She swiped another glass of champagne before Yuri could stop her.

o-o-o

Yuri wasn't sure that letting Rita get drunk was a better idea than letting Rita remain sober, but he wasn't quite sure how to take the drink away from her. And he'd started it anyway. So all he could do was make sure she didn't stray too far from him. Up at the table, Balleria was still talking.

"Individuals who knew that though they might face adversity, even death, that their efforts would bear fruit. Individuals who found alternatives, who shook up the established order, and who fought on despite suffering and loss.

"I know we are all thinking of the same few particular individuals; such persons as our lovely princess," Estelle blushed a light pink as she nodded at the immediate applause, "the gallant Commandant," the cheer here was a little mixed as poor Flynn faced the eyes of the lingering Alexei loyalists, skeptical hopefuls and practically-swooning females, "and the most Brave Vesperia," and here the cheer was almost overwhelming. Yuri could see furtive looks from the corners of people's eyes though. There were a lot of people who missed aer and blamed Brave Vesperia for its loss.

Balleria just smiled benevolently at the crowd as he continued.

"But it is not these people that we are here to celebrate. These are not the individuals who had to stand by and watch as their homes were destroyed and their ways of life become obsolete."

Yuri felt rather than saw Rita stiffen next to him. There were going to be fireballs if Balleria kept talking about things he knew nothing about.

"No, we are here to celebrate those people that survived, that kept going despite the odds. Those people who could not leave hearth and home for adventure, but had to keep a ship sailing, or make sure their neighbors could get food and clothing. Those people that rebuilt what had been broken and made it that much better. Those people who even now cannot be with us because they are busy putting planks into place or digging a well or making sure that someone else has food to put on their plate."

o-o-o

Rita had stopped listening and was just looking for a waiter to hand over her empty glass when she caught a glimpse of scruffy ponytail again. Really? He was at a formal event, thrown in his honor, surrounded by hundreds of people looking to be impressed so that they could throw money at charitable causes, and he couldn't even bother to brush his hair? She shoved her glass at Yuri and started to stomp her righteous way over to him when an overly oiled, overly coifed head of hair grabbed her attention instead. It was the doctor that had been hounding her about Raven, popping into her field of vision like a nervous jack-in-the-box.

"Not again," she barked, cutting him off. He stood there with his lips flapping open and closed like a fish out of water.

"B-b-but, Miss Mordio," he attempted. His forehead was beaded with sweat and his face was pale. Rita was reminded again that people here were scared of her . Good. It was the way it had been Aspio and that had been just fine with her. She'd almost missed it, what with having so many people all around her that didn't take her seriously. Like the old man.

The doctor was still in the way of her getting to said old man. He was still trying to say something. Rita briefly considered losing her patience. No, no she would save that for Raven. He deserved it more, even if this doctor had been far more irritating in the past few days than Raven ever could have been. So she just pushed him aside and marched on. She had bigger fish to fry.

o-o-o

She'd spotted him across the room. Dammit. He was getting sloppy if she'd not only seen him across the damn room, but also managed to catch him staring at her. He really was losing his edge. And he was drunk.

He hadn't meant to be staring at her. It was hard not to, though, when he was trying to figure it was that was wrong with her head. It took him far too long to realize that she didn't have her goggles on and her hair had been washed, and by then, she'd spotted him. She'd never believe him that he was only marveling at her hair – somehow twisted up into something resembling high fashion – but he was also pretty sure that showing that much collarbone was illegal.

So, now that he likely had only a little time left to live before she caught up to him, he proceeded to continue to get himself thoroughly slammed. It was easy enough to hide in the group of the rowdier guild members. He'd seen Yuri catch Rita, obviously trying to keep casualties down, and that was enough to keep his guilt down as he tipped up another glass of fine wine.

Because it was impossible to completely escape notice here. He just wanted to be as drunk as possible before someone who recognized him tried to speak with him. He might have dissuaded most folks in the castle from referring to him as anything other than "Raven" or "that old man" , but it didn't mean that there weren't guild members who knew him that way anyway. They'd be wanting to talk to him too, reminding him of obligations he didn't want to be remembering right now. If he was incomprehensible enough, maybe they would leave him alone for a while.

But it was not to be.

"Captain Schwann?"

Raven's eyes snapped to focus or at least as close to focused as they could be. As it was, the young lieutenant in front of him had one and a half more noses than he was supposed to.

"Th'name's Raven, boy," he slurred, but neither the intoxication nor the denial seemed to faze the lieutenant.

"Captain Schwann," he persisted, "why do you keep doing this to yourself?"

"Wha'... wha're ya talkin' abou'?"

Raven tried to blink the blurriness out of his eyes. It didn't do much good, but the lieutenant helped by leaning closer, bringing himself into focus. Raven didn't recognize him. He was young, probably just newly promoted.

"Are you undercover? Because you're not fooling anyone, sir. And there have been rumors going around, sir. You and your heart, you and that mage..."

Raven stiffened and tuned out at the dismissal of Rita as "that mage". Just as he would have reacted to the dismissal of Karol as "that kid" or Yuri as "that swordsman". Definitely would have done that. Stupid kid was probably making up stories about rumors to try to get him to confess...

"...and all that alcohol isn't good for you, sir," the younger man concluded, reaching for Raven's nearly-empty glass. And to Raven's shame when he remembered the encounter in the morning, this was what drove him over the tipping point. He snatched the glass out of reach, successfully spilling all of the rest of its contents onto himself and the floor.

"Tha'hell is wron' with ya?" he heard himself yell. Actually, he wasn't sure if he shouted or whispered. The whole room was spinning after his reaction and his jacket was suddenly three sizes too small and on fire.

"Ya lis'n 'ere, ya 'lil b'stard," he growled, leaning in close to the younger man, channeling every authoritative role he'd ever played in his life. "You don't know who I am. You don't know anything about me."

The lieutenant backed up a step as Raven puffed up and the archer staggered a little after him. He caught himself fairly well, he thought.

"My name isn't Schwann," he winced at the sloppy 'sch' but muscled on. "I don't know him anymore." His voice kept lowering, both pitch and volume. It was rather scary, if he did say so himself. "Don' think I c're 'bout wha's goin' on tha' ya should be gettin' off yer own ass to take care of."

That was the last thing he remembered saying . There was more, he knew, because the lieutenant's face changed expression several more times and his throat hurt from snarling out more words, but he couldn't recall what those words were. The absolute last thing he remembered was the feel of a wiry arm digging under his shoulder and far, far too much collarbone was pressed to his forehead and he didn't want to think about where that put his face and that was it.

o-o-o

She was almost disappointed when she finally found him, because he was so thoroughly eviscerating the officer in front of him that there was nothing she could do. There was nothing left for her to say by the end of it and so all she could do was catch him when he finally passed out. He was heavy, but she was ready for him and she just clamped down with her whole body and lowered him into a sitting position.

The young man did try to help, but he'd ruined his chances with her good favor by arguing with a drunkard in the first place and so it gave her an opportunity to snap at someone.

"Back off," was all she actually said, but she poured every ounce of her vitriol into it. "You've done enough." Her ankles tottered dangerously and she kicked her shoes off violently, regardless of where they landed or who stepped on them. They were probably ridiculously expensive, and she was probably going to feel guilty later when Estelle asked where they were, but for now, it was gratifying.

She threw the old man's arm over her shoulder and hauled him to his feet.

"C'mon, old man," she hissed at him, and he did sort of gather his feet under him. The noble idiot was still standing there as if he'd never seen such a thing before. Wasn't he a soldier? Hadn't he ever helped a comrade? What was it with the nobility and standing there like dumb sheep when they weren't told what to do?

"I see the rumors were true," he suddenly said, almost under his breath. Rita didn't know what rumors he was talking about, but she didn't need much of a reason to retaliate anymore and she didn't like his tone. She had the old man draped across her back and so she couldn't move all that much, but she'd used up all the angry words she could manage for the night. But the spirits had gotten good at figuring out what she wanted, and apparently they didn't like the officer either, because it only took her glare and a clench of her fist to light his lapel on fire. He began to panic and slap at it and more than one guild member in the crowd tried to help by throwing their mugs of beer over him. But Rita didn't care. Raven was drooling on her shoulder and she needed to get out of there.

"I've got him," she said to Yuri as the swordsman finally elbowed through the crowd to get to them. She was suddenly very tired.

They made it back to his room somehow. She almost took him to the lab, but there wasn't anywhere to put him there. And he might end up vomiting on her books or something. But she didn't know exactly where his room was and everyone and their brother wanted to help when she just wanted directions, but eventually she kicked in his door and they stood in the doorway, shadows stretching from the dim hallway into the dark, lush depths of his carpet.

She was going to leave him then; just dump him on his bed and leave. But just as she took the first step towards action, Raven stumbled forward and vomited. Wine and chunks of hors d'oeuvres puddled under him and soaked into the carpet.

Rita stared at him for a long moment, on his hands and knees, shoulders slumped, and hair falling out off his ponytail to stick to his face. She almost left him then too, to find some butler, someone qualified, to help him clean up, when she noticed he was shaking all over.

She felt like a hypocrite, for standing there like an idiot, unsure of how to react, not sure what was going on. Then he made a little noise at the back of his throat and she realized he was crying. Very drunkenly. She wasn't sure what to do.

"Hey," was what came out of her mouth. He flinched, as if he'd forgotten she was there. He brought his sleeve up and wiped across his mouth and nose, smearing more than cleaning.

"'m sorry," he said, his voice hoarse. But he was still crying. She could hear the hitches in his breath and there were tears running into his stubble.

"Whatever," Rita growled. She had been trying to do him a favor and it just kept getting worse. "Come on, let's get you cleaned up."

He was still crying as she helped him stand up then sit down in the bathtub. She practically dragged him out of his jacket, which he resisted quite vehemently for a dirty old man, and threw it in a corner of the floor where someone could eventually find it. She didn't know what they did with dirty clothes in the castle, and that honestly made her paranoid about what they'd done with her clothes after getting her in this dress. She hadn't changed in a good long while and so she wasn't sure where her jacket and tights had ended up. But that wasn't all that important right now. Instead, she turned on the water and scooped it over him. It was probably ruining his good outfit, but it also probably wasn't hurting it as much as just letting the vomit soak in. When he finally didn't smell quite so bad and she couldn't find any more little flecks of food to wash off his shirt, she stripped the shirt itself off and instead ran her fingers through his hair until all the slime was gone from there.

By the time she was done, he was asleep in the tub. It took several long minutes for her to slap him awake, his right cheek red by the end of it. Even as it was, he wasn't quite coherent as she pulled him out of the lukewarm water and stood him on the floor as she toweled off the drips with the end of the privacy curtain.

"'m sorreh," he said over and over again until she steered him towards the bed.

"Whatever," Rita growled. "Take off your clothes and go to bed."

She left as he shrugged and started to shuck his wet pants. There were things she definitely wasn't qualified for and didn't want to pretend she was. She heard him say something as she headed out, but she didn't catch it and she sure as hell wasn't going to go back in to get it again.

"Good night, old man," was all she said, and then closed the door.


	6. Chapter 6

_A/N: Merry Christmas! This actually was done on Christmas day and was supposed to be uploaded as a gift to all of you lovelies, but my interwebs did not want to play nice. So here it is, a few days late. _

* * *

><p>Yuri's fingers flexed in the space where his sword would normally hang at his side. He'd been asked - ever so nicely and ever so politely - by the castle staff on numerous occasions to just leave it in his room. He'd tried to appease them by belting it to his waist, but that had been uncomfortable and constraining. There was a reason he kept his sword hanging free, even if he did have to go looking for his scabbard after a fight was done. The rather undignified crawl under the bushes he had subjected himself to once or twice had gone unnoticed by the swarms of dead enemies he'd managed to kill before they even got a shot at him. Worth it.<p>

So instead, because he hadn't wanted to listen to their bitching - he'd learned very quickly in his short spurts of staying in the noble quarter that the servants got most snappy when the nobles were doing something particularly stupid, like throwing a huge party in the middle of national reconstruction - he'd left his sword under his mattress. Not the best hiding place for it normally, but Repede had decided that he liked the feel of the mattress and so had ended up pushing Yuri out of bed at six this morning with his long-legged, callous-pawed dog-stretches. Anyone wanted to get to Yuri's sword, they'd have to go through sleeping Repede first. And sleeping Repede was not to be trifled with.

Now, Yuri wished he had it. There was just something about Raven tucked in ever so nicely in bed, carpet was soaked with vomit, and the memory of a nearly-drunk Rita staggering out of the ballroom with Raven slung over her shoulders that made Yuri want to haul the old man out of his blankets and cut off a few of his toes. Why exactly, Yuri couldn't put his finger on, but the urge was very strong. Made even worse by the fact that Rita was nowhere to be found.

o-o-o

Raven didn't know how he ended up in his bed. He vaguely remembered the party, and trying to avoid Rita at some point. There was a brief, fleeting memory of rough fingers scrubbing at his hair and him saying something really stupid, but he couldn't remember what it was and he was pretty sure the whole thing was a dream anyway. But he was in his bed and he was naked underneath his blanket and he had a headache and as he opened his eyes, Karol's face was nearly touching his.

"Gah, Raven!" The boy, who had obviously been about to shake Raven awake, flailed backwards and nearly fell. Yuri was standing behind him though, and caught his arm before he hit the ground.

"What's goin' on?" Raven asked. Or tried to. What came out was more like incomprehensible moaning.

"Have you seen Rita around, old man?" Yuri asked. His tone was cutting, suspicious, and Raven tried to sit up and focus to see the swordsman's face.

"Nah, why?"

Yuri's forehead was crinkled into a pensive scowl, and there were bags under his eyes. Woke up too early? Stayed up too late? Woke up too early after staying up too late? What time was it anyway?

"Well, we figured, well... she took you away from the party..." Karol was blushing? "We thought she'd killed you or something, but then you're here and she's not in her lab, and..."

"What happened last night?" Yuri interrupted. Raven was pretty sure he was in trouble, but he couldn't remember why. Had he said something particularly foul to Judith? Is that what he'd done? She'd known it was a joke, right?

"I don' remember. I had a bit to drink last night." He realized that he could taste his own breath, a feat unmatched in his experience. "I think I threw up somewhere."

Karol wrinkled his nose. "Yeah, there's a stain on the floor." Yup, and Raven could smell it. Oh, the castle staff was going to hate him. How had he managed to get himself cleaned up? His chest was bare and he covered it instinctually. At least the maids stayed away from the lecherous old guildsman in the morning. Helped avoid a lot of awkward explanations.

Yuri was still waiting, arms crossed, obviously not satisfied.

"Look, I dunno where the genius mage is right now," Raven declared, pulling his blanket up over his chest like a girl out of a bath. He didn't like this being accused of things he didn't remember. "She would have killed me if she'd seen me last night anyway."

"That's what I thought too," said Yuri, crossing his arms. "But then she took you back to your room when you were making a fool of yourself and now Estelle can't find her, so I figured I'd come ask you."

"Well, she's not here." Not that he knew about, anyway. She did have a propensity to sleep in odd places. Like the time he'd found her on the second to top shelf of one of her bookcases in the lab. Probably why Estelle couldn't find her. The princess might be the mage's best friend, but she just hadn't been here for the past few weeks. There were definitely methods to Rita's madness... Wait, what?

"_Rita? _Rita put me to bed last night?" He pulled his blanket even tighter around himself, the drafts around certain parts of his bare anatomy now icy-cold. The memory of fingers rubbing at his scalp was more solid now, and yet ten thousand times less likely. And yet there weren't any maids screaming about the mechanical monster wearing the guildsman's body, so maybe he'd managed on his own? Because there was no way Rita would have... been _nice_ to him.

In an attempt at of alleviating the nervous jitters attempting to make their way into his fingers - and maybe make Yuri stop glaring at him - Raven searched through his room while pulling on pants and a shirt. No sleeping mage under the chairs or in the bathtub, on top of his bed's canopy or in a corner of the closet. Also no articles of clothing besides his own, all wet and wrinkled and chucked at random on the floor. He'd apparently been washed off at some point, because he himself didn't smell like vomit.

Estellise was waiting outside the door, wringing her hands, when Raven and his entourage of grumpy Yuri and perpetually anxious Karol emerged .

"Oh, Raven!" she said as he emerged, as if she were somehow surprised but delighted. Estelle had that air about her all the time; that innocent, almost naive happiness to see everything and everyone. It was something he wished he could do.

"Good mornin', Princess." He didn't kiss her hand, though he bowed. He wasn't sure just how clean he actually was from the night before, and Yuri's laser eyes and Karol's impatient bobbing had brooked no argument about leaving before bathing. His mouth still tasted awful.

"'Good afternoon' is more like it," she said, covering up a smile with a delicately gloved hand. Yuri went to stand beside her and smirked at Raven where the princess couldn't see. Raven just sighed and ran his hand through his hair.

"Yeah, sorry 'bout that. Had a bit of a rough night."

"The party was rather exciting last night." She was smiling - genuinely - at him, knowing exactly what it was he had done and yet still not judging him for being a raging drunkard.

"Mmm." It made him uncomfortable, the way she could just... do that.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said, taking up one of his hands and imploring with him. " I told Yuri I could look for Rita on my own, but he said you'd know where she was. I know you're probably busy. "

"Busy?"

"Yes, with work and things."

So Yuri hadn't told her that Raven had been avoiding anyone and everyone, up to and including Brave Vesperia. Yuri hadn't told her about how Raven had fallen once asleep in a cabinet meeting held specifically for him. Yuri hadn't told her about how everyone was close to giving up on Raven the guildsman, because there was no way he could have been anything useful to Brave Vesperia beyond a Captain Schwann look-a-like for tight spots, and then they probably had to talk for him to keep him from screwing things up.

Yuri hadn't told her about the small, sad minority of his men, the men he had loved like children, that were still convinced he was Captain Schwann, that came up to him in corners of the hallway and left notes under his door, begging him to come back.

Raven wasn't sure if he was grateful to Yuri or not.

"Let's go find ourselves a genius mage, shall we?" he said cheerfully, scooping the princess's hand up into the crook of his elbow - at least his clothes were clean - and escorting her down the hall.

o-o-o

Yuri would have thought that not finding Rita with Raven would somehow have relieved him. After all, the idea of Rita with Raven had bothered him so much, so it seemed like he wouldn't have been concerned anymore when that wasn't the case. But now, he was ever more nervous. Normally, he didn't care about what the mage did on her own time. Knowing Rita, it was something he didn't understand anyway. But last night, she had been... different. Not just in that she'd been wearing a dress - and that in itself had been weird enough - but she'd been nervous. And drunk. Raven didn't remember the night before and he held his alcohol far better than Rita did, Yuri knew from experience. So what trouble could the mage have gotten herself into?

o-o-o

The lab was the first destination. Rita wasn't there. They looked under stacks of books and half-welded contraptions and called her name up into the rafters. Raven flinched as Karol knocked over a box of tools and put them back haphazardly - Rita would notice immediately. He'd fix it later if he had time. Estelle was looking at the state of the room as much as for its resident, and Raven could see the vaguely concerned crinkle at her brow that had nothing to do with looking for Rita. It sent a half-formed twinge of guilt through him, knowing that Estelle was dissatisfied with Rita's living conditions. It was like it was his fault because he was the one always here. It was like it was somehow his job to be looking out for Rita now and he was failing somehow. The strangest part was that he didn't feel pressured by this expectation. It was an expectation that he had for himself. It had been a long time since he hadn't resented a responsibility. Though obviously he still wasn't any good at them.

"Well, she's not here," Yuri said finally, replacing a sheet of oilcloth from over an engine.

"Think she could have gone out to get something?" Estelle asked.

"Maybe Repede could sniff her out," Karol suggested.

Raven tried not to chuckle out loud at either of their suggestions. Rita might strike fear in the hearts of every last resident of the castle, but she had no shortage of errand runners who she tipped generously. She hadn't actually physically left her lab in quite a while. He would know. He'd been there. She'd taken to ordering extra food without asking him if he wanted anything, then foisting the leftovers off on him. It was one of those things.

And he could only imagine Rita's reaction if an entire posse came after her, with Repede leading the way, nose to the ground. If they were lucky enough for her not to fireball them out of sheer principle, _he_ would certainly never hear - or feel - the end of it. And with the way his luck went, Rita _would _just have gone out on an errand or just stepped out for some air.

"Guess we should split up and look for her," Yuri suggested. Boy was really interested in finding the mage for whatever reason. Could it be... "Me and Estelle will go looking through the grounds and the Lower Quarter."

Oh, guess not.

"I-I'll go with Raven," Karol volunteered needlessly. Smart boy though. Not only giving Yuri and Estelle some time alone together - hint hint wink wink - but if he and Raven were the ones unlucky enough to find Rita, Raven made a bigger and more obnoxious target of wrath. If Karol were to go with Yuri or Estelle, he'd be the _only _target.

Yuri and Estelle left together, the princess reaching for the swordsman's hand just as the door closed behind them. Well, wasn't that just adorable. Karol gagged a little.

"Those two need to just get married already. They keep making googly faces at each other when they think no one can see them." The boy laughed to himself. "I thought Flynn was going to cut off Yuri's nose, the way he was glaring at the two of them last night every time they danced together."

Raven didn't remember any of that. He didn't know if it was that he hadn't noticed or if it'd gotten lost somewhere in the bottom of his glass. He really was getting old.

"Hey Raven," Karol continued, clearly not noticing Raven's preoccupation, "we don't really have to keep looking for Rita, do we? I mean, she's probably going to get mad at us for worrying while she's doing something, I dunno, eccentric."

Karol knew Rita almost as well as Raven, it seemed.

"Well, the princess is worried about her and we don' want Estelle ta be worried. The genius mage'll likely turn up somewhere around here soon enough, you'll see." Raven didn't quite want to admit that with Rita not being in her lab, he was a bit worried as well. Especially because of that phantom memory of fingers that were not his rubbing at his scalp.

The thought occurred to him to maybe go check in the dungeons. She never went down there, but he never would have thought he'd end up hanging out in the mage's lab. Worth a shot, at least.

As he opened the door, Karol just behind him, the doctor who'd been bothering Rita was standing there. The man looked a mess, with a runny nose and his hair plastered to his face with sweat.

"Is she here?" the doctor demanded without even a 'how do you do.'

"No, she's not," Raven answered, not feeling motivated to come up with anything more elaborate. He started to close the door - maybe the man would go away if they ignored him for a few minutes and then they could be on their way - but the doctor lurched forward and slammed a desperate hand against the wood, halting it.

"That means I'm too late. She's gone."

"What are ya talkin' about?"

"They told me they were going to take her."

"What?" Karol looked from the doctor to Raven.

" I wasn't supposed to say anything. But we need her here. Please, she has to come back. She's important here. They told me they'd kill me," the man continued, practically sobbing now. "B-but I can't let them get away with this."

"Who're 'they'?" Raven ground out. "What is 'this'?"

He realized he was scared. It was a weird feeling. He couldn't remember really the last time he'd been afraid for something. Resigned, sure, but not afraid.

This was new.

"Where. is. she?"

o-o-o

Rita didn't remember falling asleep when she woke up. It was still dark and she was still in her dress, what the... That's right, she didn't know where her usual clothes were. At least she was comfortable. All her fingers and toes moved when she wiggled them. She'd once woken up to both of her legs having fallen asleep from the hip down because of how she had ended up nestled among stacks of books. Raven had thrown a blanket over her, but he'd left her where she was. So she hadn't felt any remorse about yelling him awake from the rug until he helped her stand up.

Well, she was fine now. Her head hurt a bit, but that's what she got for drinking. More sleep was in order, regardless of how the bodice of her dress was bunched up and uncomfortably tight. She went to roll over, but was halted by something. It wasn't just her dress. There was actually something stopping her. Stopping her arm as well when she tried to lift it up and rub at her eyes.

At first, she didn't panic. This wouldn't be the first time she had woken up underneath something or covered in equipment. There were times she didn't remember sleeping at all, just blinked in the midst of working and suddenly it was lighter or darker outside. But as she continued to try to move, to free herself, to figure out what she'd gotten herself into, nothing was yielding. It wasn't uncomfortable, just restricting.

And she wasn't in her lab. It was too dark to see where she was, but it was too quiet to be her home. Her lab was always filled with some kind of bubbling or clanking or crackling. More often than not lately, there had been Raven's humming or talking or snoring. It was too quiet here, too completely silent.

"Efreet?" Rita whispered.

The creation of the spirits had eliminated the aer. Blastia didn't work anymore and magic had needed a complete rework. Rita was a genius of course, so it had taken her a few days to figure out how to work through magic. Might have been cheating a bit in that she knew the spirits personally and could ask them questions, but they weren't scientists. They didn't know how the blastia had worked through them or where their power came from any more than she had. But they'd muddled through.

She'd spread the word, but there were still only a few mages so far in the world that were able to use their spells. It wasn't about skill anymore. It was about knowing the spirits. Rita had known the blastia. It hadn't taken much of a change in her mindset. And for some reason, despite her self-acknowledged hypocrisy of constantly calling on them for stupid reasons like burning the old man's eyebrows off - though she was pretty sure the spirits agreed with her that he deserved it - it seemed like the spirits liked her for the most part.

"A little light?" Rita asked the darkness. Her fingers were free to wiggle, and she snapped them quietly.

Nothing happened.

"P-please?" She wasn't proud of the way her voice cracked. But she didn't like the dark, no matter how shadowy and dank Aspio might have been. There, at least, there had always been the glowing of lamps and fluorescent moss and her burners and open flames at all hours of the day.

Here, there was nothing. No glimmer of light. She snapped her fingers again. Nothing. More than that, she didn't feel the spirits at all. It was one of those things she didn't notice until it was gone, but she was cold. There was no curl of heat threading its way through her ribs and around her heart. Instead, there was just the methodical beat of the muscle, all alone and hollow. Is that what it felt like to be Raven? To have some vital part of yourself missing? But hers wasn't even replaced with anything. She felt empty. And lonely. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt lonely. She had never been alone, not with the blastia. But now... there was nothing. No one.

Suddenly she was terrified. She didn't know where she was. She couldn't move. The spirits were gone. For the first time in her life, Rita was completely at a loss. Even facing down Duke and the Adaphagos, with no actual hope of success, she had at least known she would die fighting, doing what she knew how to do. Even in that damn ghost ship, she'd at least been able to see what was coming, if only in shadows. Here, now, there was complete and utter black. She couldn't do anything. Just lay there and wait.

Rita wasn't good at waiting. And she didn't know how being terrified was supposed to work.

"Hey! What the hell?" she shouted, barked even, as if Karol had done something stupid again and she was dishing out punishment. "Who's out there? Talk to me!"

Nothing. The darkness didn't dissipate. No sound at all.

"I swear, someone tell me what's going on. I'm started to get pissed off."

Yelling should have helped. But there wasn't even an echo. Somehow that made it worse.

o-o-o

"She's gone." It was what they were getting out of the doctor the most. "They took her."

Karol sighed in frustration, but Raven ignored him. They'd dragged the doctor into the lab and sat him onto a chair, none of which had been met with resistance. Karol looked torn, not sure whether to run and get the army or start pulling the doctor's toenails off.

Raven seemed to be the only one in the room who still had his head on, but he did have his hands balled into fists in his sleeves as he crossed his arms, sitting on a chair across from the doctor.

"They took her," the doctor said. He definitely had the proper amount of fear based on the what was likely to happen to him, but it wasn't helping his coherency.

"All right, I understand that part. Who is 'they'?" Raven asked, forcing himself to keep from clenching his teeth.

"I... I can't tell you. They'll kill me."

"See him?" Raven nodded at Karol. "_He'll_ kill you if you don't tell us."

The boy made a distressed noise and looked around as if trying to find a place to hide, which somewhat spoiled the effect Raven had been going for, but he didn't think the doctor even noticed.

"Jus' start with yer name, how 'bout?" Raven tried again. "Seen ya around quite a bit, it seems, but who are ya?"

"My name's Balfour," the doctor said, eyes screwed shut as if that would somehow protect him - from what, Raven wasn't sure. Karol's knees knocking together? "I became the castle physician after my colleague died in the attacks on the city. He was a good man, always looking to help others out."

"Rita tol' me ya'd been botherin' her about me," Raven asked, trying to get the interrogation back on track. The doctor opened his eyes again and stared at Raven's chest.

"Yes. There'd be rumors about you before and then the maid came babbling something about electricity on your chest." Balfour's fingers began making little grabby motions that he probably wasn't even aware of in his lap. "It's well-known - thanks to your actions - that Alexei was doing experiments with blastia and humans. But with all the blastia gone, the research was useless."

Raven shifted in his seat. The doctor blinked and his gaze went up from Raven's chest to his face.

"But you have a blastia, don't you? You're one of his subjects, and your blastia's still working!"

Karol looked at Raven. He could feel the boy's eyes burning into the back of his head. He didn't say anything, just met the doctor's gaze until the other man grew uncomfortable and looked away.

"I didn't mean to expose you. I wasn't going to do anything about it, I swear! But I was always fascinated with Alexei's work-"

"You were an Alexei loyalist?" Karol interrupted. It wasn't really that hard to believe. Raven had been himself at one point.

"Y-yes." Balfour seemed like he had forgotten other people were in the room. "I never met him personally, but every so often, he would present something to the medical community, some lifesaving technique or device. He never took credit for it, but we all knew it was his work. So innovative and always flawless. We... we didn't know what it was he was doing in order to develop them. Hundreds of lives have been saved thanks to him."

"Do you know how many people have suffered because of what he did?" Raven asked quietly, dangerously.

"Yes. Now, yes. It's why I wasn't going to do anything about it. I couldn't, with a good conscience, pursue anything more. But with what he's already given us... And there you were with a working blastia in this time of complete disaster. Don't you understand, you could possibly be holding the key to our world's rebirth? A blastia that doesn't require the apatheia."

"No one ever said I had a blastia," Raven said gently, "and we already had a rebirth, 'member? We jus' need ta learn how ta use the mana correctly. Which is what Rita was workin' on. That and about a thousand other projects that're going ta help ev'ryone rebuild."

"I know, I know..." The doctor waved his hand impatiently, his sudden movement causing Karol to take a step backwards and Raven to lean forward.

"So why'd they take Rita?"Raven asked. "What's she got ta do with this?"

"She knew something. It was obvious. She's brilliant, no matter her attitude, but she wouldn't share with anyone. I tried asking her, just to find out if my hunch was correct. It wasn't as though I was going to try to do anything with it. I don't have the qualifications. But I was curious. I knew I was right. And she kept shooting me down. Told me I was a nobody, that it wasn't any of my concern what 'people with actual brains' were doing."

Raven winced. Yeah, sounded like something Rita would say when being cornered and pestered.

"So... so I discussed her with a colleague. Ranted at him, really. I didn't know he was involved with those fanatics."

"Fanatics? Which fanatics?"

"The Spiritualists, the ones who think the spirits are gods?" Balfour was blushing now that he was done crying, all the while squirming uncomfortably in his chair. "I tried to warn her last night when she was talking with them. but she just wouldn't _listen._"

"They asked me all kinds of questions. At first, I didn't think anything of it. It was just little things that are well known, like where her labs are or what she's working on here at the castle. Then it was things like if Mage Mordio could still use blastia, or if she knew how to make them work again. She's known for still being able to use magic, you know. As are the princess's healing artes."

"And there were a lot of questions about you." Balfour said to Raven. "What you were doing here, how you were related to everyone. I didn't have much to tell them. I don't know you all that well. You look a great deal like Captain Schwann, which I guess is who they thought you were."

Well, there was at least one person who wasn't convinced Raven was leading a double life and betraying everyone he knew.

"So do you know what they did with her?"

o-o-o

Rita concentrated. On what, she wasn't quite sure, but after hours of silence, she realized there was a slight humming. It wasn't audible, more of a gentle current running over her skin. It was familiar and yet foreign and she couldn't quite place her finger on what it was. So she'd been focusing on it instead of on the way her heart kept skipping beats and her legs had jolts of hot and cold running through them from what she could only assume was panic.

It felt like a spirit. But not quite a spirit. It was outside of her instead of inside, forming a shell instead of penetrating through her. That's what this was. It was like the waves of energy from Undine as she was formed, stretching her limbs and feeling a new form for the first time. Except, again, it wasn't digging in. It just curled over her skin, pressing against her and holding her down, rather than going through her, encompassing her. It was why she couldn't feel it, why she still felt alone.

And it was unfamiliar. Each spirit had its own feel, its own personality. It was like blastia. Rita could tell immediately when she had seen a blastia before. It was why they had their own names. It was because they had all been individuals. Rita was crap with names and faces of people, but blastia - and spirits now - were something she actually liked and could recognize instantly. This, this she didn't recognize.

"Hey," she said to it, now that she knew it was there. "What do you think you're doing?"

If she'd been able to, she would have crossed her arms. As it was, her arms twitched in the darkness and she felt - _felt - _ it flinch in response.

"Yeah, I'm awake now and I know you're there. And I am demanding that you let me go, right now!"

For a split second, it worked. There was a flash of light so bright it shorted out the nerves in her eyes so all she could see was white. There was white and there was noise and someone shouting for someone else to 'put it back, put it back immediately!' and then there was nothing again. But she was not in her lab and she wasn't alone, but she didn't recognize any of the voices and someone was doing something to her.

And she _could. _

_not. _

_move._

Not her mouth, not her fingers, not her eyelids. She was clamped down into place and the humming was going through her brain, shutting it down and pulling pieces of it off. It didn't hurt, it didn't feel quite real, but she knew it was happening. She tried to stay awake, to keep it from taking away her will to keep thinking, keep breathing, but she couldn't move, couldn't breathe.

When she finally passed out, nothing changed. It was still black and silent.

o-o-o

Whoever had taken Rita had been thorough. Not only was she gone, but as Raven frantically tore through her folders, every scrap of her research had been taken. All those papers that had earned him scorch marks and a black eye that still throbbed even now despite Estelle's dose of healing, they were gone. He had put them away himself and now they had been removed with careful precision. It was like they knew where to look, because the drawers hadn't been ransacked. It was like Rita had taken them out herself. Had she? But why would she? She wasn't working with these nutjobs, was she? She told him herself that the doctor had been bothering her. Rita didn't work willingly with people that irritated her. Witcher had been 'fired' from more than one of their joint assignments and no one had tried to convince Rita that she couldn't actually fire him because she hadn't hired him.

Karol was standing guard over the doctor, but they were both at about the same level of coherency.

"Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh, what are we going to do, Raven?"

"Yer jus' gonna keep standin' there, Cap'n," Raven told him. "Make sure he doesn't move."

Balfour was apparently done with his own hysterics, but now he had rested his head in his hands and curled into a small ball on his chair. He wasn't moving any time soon.

"I'm going to be arrested for treason. I didn't mean to, I swear."

"I believe ya, Balfour," Raven said, trying to see if he could get any more information out of him by humoring the man while the archer himself continued to scour Rita's lab. "Anythin' more you can tell me? Name of the 'colleague' you blabbed about all this ta?"

The doctor hesitated. "He... he's gone. He told me they'd kill me if I told anyone."

"Doncha know that jus' means he wants ta be found out? If he really wanted ya ta keep quiet about it, he would've killed ya."

Still, Balfour looked up at Raven with fearful eyes and sealed lips.

"Look, I'm beggin' ya here. All those innovations and whatnot that Alexei gave you? All those lives saved? If those mean anything ta ya, you'll tell me where they took Rita, because she's the only one who's ever gonna be able to make those work again."

"I'm such a coward. Such a coward," the doctor muttered to himself. "Olimar," he said out loud finally. His name's Olimar. He lived in the noble quarter, practiced out of his home. I respected him," he said, again dropping down to a mutter. "I respected and trusted him and he goes and does this."

"Like I said," Raven reassured him, coming over to lay a hand on the man's shoulder, "he's looking to get himself caught. Prison's a safe place for ya, don't worry. We'll get this sorted out."

Raven then caught Karol by the arm and hauled him out of earshot, bending down to whisper in the boy's ear.

"Listen, as soon as I'm gone, ya holler bloody murder until the guards get here, understand? They'll arrest him and get him off yer hands, and then ya go and tell Yuri and the princess what's going on. A squad of soldiers, some kind of task force or somethin', get that together and on this. See if ya can get Judy and Ba'ul on call." Judy would be useful for what he had in mind, but she'd taken to not hanging around the castle lately. There was no way to get her quickly at the moment.

"O-okay!" Karol squared his jaw, even if he was still trembling a bit. Kid knew when to buckle down and get a task done, even if he didn't know how. "Wait! Where are you going?"

"I've got a house call to make."

"Wha-"

"Karol, son, listen. Ya gotta keep quiet about this. If they know I'm coming, everythin'll be ruined. All very hush-hush for the element of surprise, understand? So ya can't tell anyone where I'm going, not even Yuri. Just make up some excuse for me. Tell 'em I hid or something, 'kay?"

"O-okay." Karol looked unsure. That was okay. Raven was unsure himself.

"Hey Raven?" The boy looked over at Balfour, who was staring blankly into space, speaking silently to himself. "Did you mean it? Is he really going to be okay? Like, he'll be safe if he's in jail, won't he? They won't be able to kill him, will they?"

Raven looked over at the man just as Balfour made eye contact with him. The doctor knew. Still made the decision that he did. Raven might have not liked the man, but for a brief moment, he respected him.

"We all gotta die someday, Karol."


	7. Chapter 7

Whoever had taken her wanted Rita alive. Raven just kept telling himself that as he rounded corner after corner. When did these hallways get so damn long? The genius mage was no good to anyone dead, so she had to be kept alive. Rita was unlikely to be talkative to kidnappers though, and he didn't even want to think about how the mage would react to torture. Rita could be far too stubborn for her own good sometimes and who knew how far she would push them? Raven had talked before under pressure because sometimes there were secrets not worth keeping. How worth keeping was his secret to her? It was a question he just didn't want to think about. It was selfish. So he didn't. He didn't know if she had told anyone, and he didn't want to know if her clamming up was making something worse.

Instead, he made the familiar twists and turns the hallways at a dead run, dragging the leather cord out of his hair until it fell down around his ears and flowed behind him, until he found his old barracks. The Schwann Brigade, the loser squadron, dead-last in every category except those that mattered. Loyalty. Persistence. Honor. These were what the Schwann Brigade was known for, was mocked for. These were what he needed now.

Leblanc looked hung-over from the night before as he opened the door to Raven's frantic pounding - slightly green, with bags under his eyes - but he had his chest puffed up and his uniform neatly pressed in contrast to Raven's disheveled panting.

"Capta..." It came out before Leblanc could stop it, Raven saw. He coughed, the sound almost like a retch, but he straightened up and wore an expression of surprised politeness. "Sir?" he corrected himself. Raven himself wasn't even sure what he was doing anymore. But he forged on. And he fell into Schwann's canter and accent more easily than he would have thought after such a long period of retirement.

"I need your help, Leblanc."

o-o-o

"Thank you for helping me look for Rita, Yuri. You didn't have to."

Estelle had linked her last two fingers into Yuri's pinky finger and pulled him along for a long moment, but now they were just walking together. It had surprised him when Estelle had reached down for his hand without a word, but he didn't say anything, even when she let him go after a few minutes.

"No problem. She had a rough night last night, so I wanted to make sure she was okay too."

"Yes. I feel terrible. I barely got to see her at all in her dress and she was so pretty. I know Rita isn't too fond of crowds. It meant a lot that she came anyway," Estelle had her hands linked behind her back, but he knew it was to hide the fact that she was squeezing her fingers together.

"Mmhmm," Yuri murmured distractedly. It was weird, worrying about Rita. It was like worrying about Judy or something.

But then, he'd never seen Rita look as nervous as she did the night before.

They didn't say anything for a while as they made their way out of the castle and through the early evening shadows of the castle grounds. Rita wasn't anywhere in the gardens or the training grounds for the soldiers, so Yuri showed Estelle the way he used to sneak from the Lower Quarter up to the castle when he was still a kid dreaming of being a knight. Flynn was going to kill him for taking the princess out of the castle without supervision, but he didn't care all that much. The look on Estelle's face when she saw the decorations still hanging from the walls of the Lower Quarter made anything Flynn would say later worth it.

"Oh, it's beautiful! Look at all the flowers!"

The people of the Lower Quarter had really outdone themselves. It had looked nice by twilight but in the actual light it looked almost like snow, except snow never looped and twirled over itself in garlands. Yuri had to admit, it looked... clean, like the Lower Quarter was starting over from scratch. A blank canvas or something, with pieces that still needed to be put together in neat piles all decorated with swaths of white. All ready to face the new world, a world in which they really didn't need him.

They never had. He knew that. Even after their valuables had been stolen, even when the aque blastia had gone missing, they never really had needed him. They'd been waiting for him to move on, to find bigger and better things. They could take care of themselves. He'd always thought of them as needing assistance, as being oppressed. But they knew how to take care of themselves. And him. And now their job was done. He was grown and out in the world. He didn't really belong here anymore.

H e wasn't even sure it felt like home anymore. Estelle waved at everyone and they waved back. A group of kids ran up to Yuri, clamoring and shouting, then running away as quickly as they had come. They'd all grown. It had only been a few weeks since he had last seen them, but it felt as though they were inches taller. Hanks was talking with Maria under a canopy, and he nodded, almost a sort of a bow for Estelle's sake, at the two of them as they passed by. Yuri wasn't sure how he should respond. The sight of the old man made him suddenly uncomfortable. He returned the nod awkwardly, but he knew that Hank knew that he was uncomfortable. And Hank knew why, even if Yuri wasn't quite sure himself.

Estelle pulled him along though. Despite the appearances of meandering, the princess was still very much on a mission. She was chatting with everyone who called out a friendly word, but the chatting was mostly about whether or not they had seen the mage through here. The answer was always negative. Rita hadn't been out here.

"Yuuuuurrrriiii! Esteeeellllle!" Karol's familiar cry cut through the happy hubbub of Lower Quarter voices. Yuri turned just as Karol tripped and crashed into Estelle's skirt, nearly knocking them both sideways.

"What's wrong, Cap'n?" Yuri caught Estelle's waist and kept her upright with a gentle push against her fall.

"Rita!" Karol picked himself up, coughing a little as he gasped for air, but his eyes were wide with panic. "Rita's been kidnapped!" he gasped, trying to keep his voice down and pretty much failing.

"What?"

Karol sucked in a breath to explain, but a burst of noise erupted from the Upper Quarter.

It was muffled by distance and buildings in the way, but the cobblestones rattled in place and a dark plume of smoke began to stretch up into the sky, angry black behind the clean white of the Lower Quarter. An explosion?

"The hell -"

"Yuri, what's going on?" Estelle wasn't allowed to have her sword or shield in the castle, but Yuri noticed how she automatically clutched for them. He handed her his sword - something he had always been surprised and proud about, that she could use his swords if their style fit her techniques - and picked up a length of pipe from a nearby stack of building supplies cleverly being used as a hot pastries stand. The pipe was too short and a bit too thick, with no grip and an odd kink in the end, but he could manage.

"I dunno, but let's go find out. Stay behind me."

Karol dragged his hammer out of his bag and was running with them as screams continued to echo through the Quarters. Quite a few others, guild members and citizens alike, were running towards the commotion too, meeting those that were running away from it. There were some flashes of blood and obviously broken limbs, and pieces of shrapnel were raining down like stone hail to bounce off the building walls and through the streets. It had been a big explosion, wherever it had been set off.

"Yuri!" Estelle called and Yuri whirled to see her drop to her knees near a wounded citizen and the glowing arcs of her healing surge to life.

"Estelle, we don't have time for this." Whatever it was, Yuri needed to know what was going on. Whoever had done it might be getting away right now.

"What else am I supposed to do? These people need me." Estelle fixed him with a glare and for a split second, that was all that existed in the world. Her grass green eyes were wide and bright and angry and her pink hair swirled around her face in the wind of people passing by. He wanted to stare. He wanted to take a moment and drink it in the way he would never have thought to before the Adaphagos. But then she turned away again and laid her hands on another man's bleeding chest and Karol was shouting at him.

"Yuri! The castle's on fire!"

Yuri turned. It was. It wasn't a very big fire, not for as big an explosion as there had apparently been, but part way up one of the towers, there were flames shooting out of a hole in the wall. Yellow and red belching soot and ash against the silver and teal of the spires. The great towers of the capital, high and secure and never going to fail, were on fire. Yuri's pulse was ringing in his own ears.

"I can't leave you here, Estelle," Yuri yelled at the princess. This was her home, no matter what she protested.

"Then don't!" she shouted back, stopping him again with nothing more than her words. "Help me with this instead!"

She had dragged on of her gloves off - those long silk gloves that cost more than Hanks had probably ever seen in his life - and tied it around a man's arm to stop the bleeding. There was only so much she could do on a quick heal and she needed to keep her strength up if she was going to do a marathon run of magic. His sword lay forgotten next to her and she had a streak of blood on her face already.

"Lady Estellise!" A bellow came from up above them on the road between the Quarters and Yuri snatched the sword from the street and stood between the princess and the guard that nearly tripped in his hurry to get to them.

"Lady Estellise! Are you all right?" The guard, one of the palace guards with his visor up and sweat running down his temple, moved forward as if to touch her, but Yuri pushed the armored hand away with the hilt of his sword.

"Hold up there, buddy. What's going on?"

The guard didn't seem offended, and instead actually looked at Yuri.

"Oh, Mr. Lowell, it's you. The princess is safe. The explosion, it was part of an attempt to kidnap her. When she was nowhere in sight, we feared the worst, but they didn't know where she was either. But it turns out she was here safe with you."

"Sure, safe with me," Yuri said, trying to brush away the guard was now trying to touch him. "What's this about a kidnap attempt?"

"Yuri?" Estelle didn't stand up from where she was leaning over a child someone had brought to her. She wasn't scared. There was a time when she would have called his name and it would have be a cry for help. She just wanted information. Yuri looked over. She was incredibly visible in her blue silk and shining mess of hair, against the gray of the cobblestone and the rusty red of blood and dirt that just seemed to be accumulating around her. Someone had tried to kidnap her. Yuri gripped his sword tighter, and then relaxed into a stance that was loose and casual, one that he had practiced by not practicing it.

"Estelle, don't go anywhere without me, understand? Just keep doing what you're doing."

o-o-o

The Schwann brigade only had the location of the mansion they were supposed to search and a vague understanding that they were investigating a kidnapping. Raven hadn't even mentioned Rita's name. The fewer people knew that the mage was kidnapped, the better right now. Karol was likely telling the story to anyone with ears, and who knew what the doctor was going to do now that he was implicated in the whole thing, but... Don't think about the things he had done wrong already. Looking back just led to regrets. He had enough of those already.

He did have to hand it to the Schwann brigade, that bunch of loyal, stupid, wonderful sons of his, they were quick. Not quicker than him, but he could hear them on his heels as he weaved his way through the castle. No one was going to look twice at him after the others had paraded through.

Raven was not panicking. He wasn't. He was not. He was just in a hurry, walking so quickly Leblanc was having a hard time keeping up. Behind him, Adecor and Boccos scurrying behind. There were better soldiers in the brigade, stronger, smarter, faster, but Adecor, Boccos and Leblanc had chased Yuri across two continents. If they couldn't find Rita, nothing was going to stop them from trying.

He had thought the problem was going to be subtlety. He had dragged on a wrinkled uniform from the bottom of a chest without asking its owner. Schwann would have reprimanded the soldier for not taking care of his equipment if he had been in charge, but Raven wasn't going to push his luck with Leblanc. As it was, the uniform was too small across his chest and he was preoccupied with trying to get his hair into some semblance of a disguise. He'd stolen a pair of eyeglasses from a passing servant - he would have to get someone to find out who that old man was and give the glasses back - and had them resting on the end of his nose. He'd stumbled over his own feet twice in less than fifteen paces and was already feeling dizzy from the terrible focus in the lower half of his vision.

But he was on his way. The disguise was shitty, but he'd already been mocked by two guards - really, 'Schlub brigade' was still in use even with its leader gone? - on his way down the hallway and so he at least was passing as a member, if only because no one knew any of them by sight. They were just a blur of orange uniform and bumbling feet. Excellent.

He wasn't panicking. He was not panicking.

And then the explosion had happened. It had rocked the side of the castle, sending priceless porcelain vases onto the floor and knocking Adecor over. Boccos helped him up and the two of them were instantly at attention as LeBlanc whirled on his heel.

"What tha hell?" Raven ripped the glasses off his face in time to avoid being trampled by a rush of people headed towards the noise.

"You two!" LeBlanc just pointed down the hallway. "Go and see who needs help. Make sure the servants are safe."

Raven had to hand it to the Schwann brigade, that bunch of loyal, stupid, wonderful sons of his, they were quick. With a salute right off the training grounds, Adecor and Boccos were off. LeBlanc turned to Raven.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said. Raven didn't miss how he deliberately didn't attribute a name or rank. And then he was down the hallway, bending to help a maid up from where she had fallen.

"Leblanc!" Raven barked, aware that he was panicking - no, nope, not that - that he was being irrational, that he was being... selfish.

Leblanc looked back and for the first time in all the many, many years Raven had known him, had taught him, had commanded him, had fought with him, there was no respect in Leblanc's eyes.

"I'm sorry, sir," Leblanc just said again. "We have to tend to the wounded. It's what Captain Schwann would have wanted."

Raven stood frozen, barely registering when a nobleman bumped past him with nary an apology or acknowledgement. They were right, damn it. Schwann would have said take care of the wounded. One rescue mission or any number of lives saved.

Schwann was dead.

Judy suddenly appeared next to him, standing practically on tiptoe with her hands clasped behind her back.

"Hullo," she said brightly, as if there were not frightened and pained screams echoing through the marble hallways.

"Judith, darlin'," he breathed out in a rush.

"You haven't seen Rita, have you? She's not in her lab and a guard was very rude to me there. And then this." She waved a dismissive hand, but he saw the glint in her eye. She was appraising him, still as though it was just the two of them having a private conversation and she was testing how much he knew.

o-o-o

Rita would never ever have told anyone, no matter the torture or coercion. Ever.

Yuri's smile always sent little butterflies fluttering through her stomach.

It was hormones, she knew. Just a chemical imbalance brought on by the onset of puberty and Yuri having a ridiculously symmetrical and delicate facial structure. Besides, even if she had been interested in things like that - which she definitely wasn't - there was no way she could ever get in the way of Estelle's chance at happiness with him. She would die first.

So when she woke out of a very lengthy and complicated dream about how Yuri had declared his undying love for her with bouquets of flowers and dramatic kisses and all of those other cliché romantic gestures, it was a bit confusing. Sure, there had been dreams about Yuri before, but they were all very fleeting and vague and left her feeling shamed and filthy somehow. She couldn't remember the last time she had remembered a dream in its entirety when she'd woken up. This, however, had been detailed and elaborate, delving into a part of her mind that she had never let herself go very deep into. And it was frightening, uncomfortable to the point of panic again. Rita already didn't like dreaming - she was not used to not being in control of her mind - but this had been almost lucid dreaming, as if she were aware while it was all going on and yet it was going on anyway. And now her head was splitting and her brain felt as though someone had taken a hot knife through it.

And she wasn't even sure she was actually awake. It was still dark and it was still warm and she still couldn't move. The humming was vibrating its way gently through her teeth now, almost as if she were covered in a hive of tiny bees. It was strong, but as she focused on it, it retreated. It knew she knew it was there, and while it was sticking around, it seemed to want to avoid her. Crushing down the lingering waking panic, she sucked down a deep breath. They were still lingering - feelings of fleeting warm touches and confusing emotions - and she focused on those, shoving them under a magnifying lens and picking them the hell apart.

The fantasies and thoughts weren't hers. She could tell that much. Flowers and hearts were not her idea of a good time. So it was someone else - that invading presence that had ripped through her mind. But they didn't know her mind very well. They didn't know _her_ yet, they just knew a secret. Not even the biggest secret she had. But definitely the best-guarded. Which meant anything else was fair game. She had to shut them down. Now. Before they could actually figure out what half the other things buried deep in her mind meant.

But it kept slithering away from her. Intelligent. Cunning. It knew she knew it was there and it flinched away from her. Familiar, like the answer to an equation that just kept slipping out of her fingers as she tried to write it down. Like a tricky blastia formula.

o-o-o

Judith was a much better partner in Raven's mad dash across the Upper Quarter than the Schwann brigade would have been. She slipped through the crowd of soldiers and stretchers like a fish, her spear held daintily behind her back as if it were a shy lily instead of sharp enough to take a man's leg off. She was silent and determined and Raven almost had to struggle to keep pace instead of trailing clumsy, armor-clad soldiers. Instead, he felt the clumsy one, with the uniform he hadn't bothered to attempt to wriggle out of still binding his chest. His blastia was stretched tight underneath the fabric, its corners making a clear outline beneath the Schwann colors. It made him uncomfortable and not just because it was making his condition noticeable.

The house was a lush, out-of-the way mansion, not so far from the palace that the sound of shouting and even the faint roaring of the flames wasn't audible. Raven didn't recognize the architecture, couldn't connect it to a name. Probably a new noble come into his inheritance. A doctor, apparently. So just out of school? The part of Raven that wasn't in a mind-roaring pan- panting effort to keep up, was trying to take in as many details as possible.

Because everyone was staring or running towards the castle, the streets were mostly deserted which was both relieving and unnerving.

"Hmm, this feels funny," Judy said distractedly from ahead of him as they slunk onto the property.

"What's that, Judith darlin'?" Raven asked, but he barely had the words out before he felt it. Deep in the clockwork of his heart, there was a buzzing, a humming of excess power jamming up the gears and ticks. He actually had to pause for a minute and put one hand to his chest, as if it were an angry cat that just needed to be soothed. As if it were Rita on a bad day. The thought sent another shuddering hiccup through his heart and for a moment of old, sad and helpless, he had both hands on his knees to keep himself upright. He was surprised no one had ever said anything about the house. The feeling was palpable on his skin, not just in his heart.

It was a familiar feeling though, like the sun on his face or skin-on-skin contact. It felt... alive and warm and almost comforting, if not for the way it made his blastia skip and shudder from the interference.

The feeling distracted Raven for a long enough moment that Judy grabbed his sleeve and tugged him into a crouch just outside the grounds. They'd come in stealthily compared to how it would have been with the Schwann brigade and so they had a moment to consider their approach and he'd almost blown it.

"Are you all right?" Judith asked conversationally.

"Never better, m'dear." It hit Raven again in a rush that Rita was kidnapped, gone. She'd know what this buzzing in his heart was. Was she causing it? It wasn't strong, just noticeable. He tweaked at his nose, trying to pretend that he wasn't stamping down hope that maybe she was just in this door, maybe this would be easy.

"What does that feel like ta ya?" he asked, tapping unobtrusively at the glass plate on his chest.

"Mmm, a little tingle. Like goosebumps in the sun. It's not strong, though," she said significantly even as she didn't look at him. "I don't imagine anyone else has noticed it."

She ruffled her antennae as if to explain and glanced up at the sky. "So how do you want to go about this?"

Raven rubbed his blastia once more and then stood up again. His lack of pulse was whirring in his ear - a constant, whooshing hum instead of a hammering - but he tugged at the wrinkles of his uniform.

"I'm going to knock," he said, plastering a professional dullness on his face that he hadn't used in a long, long while. "After all, there's a lot of suspicious activity going on today and I'm pretty sure I saw a bee-a-utiful but very shady and dangerous-looking lady with a spear sneaking around back."

Raven felt his face grow hot as Judith's teeth glittered at him when she smiled. Then, with a single graceful shove against the ground, she was over a hedge and through the topiaries.

In smart military fashion, he rapped on the door with the hilt of his dagger to simulate an armored fist. He missed the brigade again. The numbers behind him would have looked far more convincing. LeBlanc had gotten good at that look of stern disappointment.

He banged on the door again.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Oh my geez, it's been how long since I've updated? _


	8. Chapter 8

"Is that him?" Rita heard one voice ask another. There were two of them in there with her. The hider and the seeker. It was elegant, a binary system, and she hadn't quite cracked it.

They were asking each other about another presence that had suddenly encroached in the sphere. It was coarse and familiar, a whooshing hum she had heard in the back of her awareness in late hours of the night. Her heart skipped a beat as if to lend one and she felt the spirits snap to attention. Dammit.

"He's on the grounds," the spirits hummed in tandem to whatever was outside. And then they were silent, watching. But they were everywhere, humming in their excitement and suddenly, painfully visible.

Rita tried to keep her mind quiet - to not think, not be curious - but that wasn't how the genius mage of the City of Shadows had made her way to fame. Grounds of what? Somewhere the spirits were watching, obviously. But where? Close by? Where they were holding her? Or somewhere entirely different?

"You know him, right?" the voices asked as Raven's face - roguish and grinning and too many days without having shaved - flashed through her brain. That was how she thought of him. It was the first image in her head whenever she heard his name, not that she'd ever noticed it. The image was layered over how the spirits saw him now - sallow and grim and looking a little green, looking like a familiar stranger - and Rita's mind clicked through another set of deductions.

The spirits' questions was clearly some attempt at human niceties, the notion of politeness a new toy to play with in their minds judging by the quiet giddiness, like the courtiers giggling at a private joke. It was clear that she knew him, from the jolt of recognition to the dozens, if not hundreds of images and feelings that probably shot up every time he opened his mouth at her but that always had been subconscious before now. Rita tried to ignore the spirits' mental tittering so that she could focus on this new awareness of her own psyche and Raven's head as she invaded it as a passenger or parasite. It was clear she knew him, but she really didn't know him at all. Rita was awash in memories, thoughts, fantasies, and exchanges as Raven's mind was laid open before hers. Sensations and emotions she didn't even know existed were battering against her brain, not as if she were feeling them, but as if her eyelids had been forced open. The first time he had ever killed someone. The last time he had killed someone. Casey. The many, many times the Commandant had hit him. Or hadn't hit him and how that somehow had been worse. A fear far beyond anything Rita had ever experienced - even as she had stood on that tower plateau and faced her death - bumped against her lungs. Raven was old - not as physically old as he always claimed to be - but an old built of experience and loss and lies.

"Wh-what is he doing here?" She didn't even know where 'here' really was, but how was she seeing him? Bleedthrough? Did the spirits just work in some big mixing pot of thought? But then why weren't the ones outside - whoever they were and wherever outside was - in here as well? Was there a wall somewhere? On purpose? Or was this just some ploy to try and coax more information out of Rita. Dammit, she'd already let them see too much then.

A swirl of panic, the sound of a whirring heart - too fast, damn idiot was going to burn it out doing that - and her own face rushed through the sphere. His thoughts right now, both conscious and unconscious. Rita saw things she knew she would never, ever have been allowed to see before. Raven didn't feel... like that, did he? Those things...

Rita clamped down, the thought taking far more effort than it should have. He was looking for her. That was what mattered. She needed to just get as much information as she could out of the situation as she could before he found her. They were still out there. She knew one of their faces. Nobody she had recognized, but someone she would definitely recognize again. She could bring them down. She just had to get out of here. If only...

...Dammit. She froze in her thoughts mid-plan. The spirit surrounded her, encompassing every aspect of her thoughts and being. They knew. She was really bad at this. Since she had noticed them, the spirits had poked their heads in as if to see if she was still watching, plotting and scheming and clearly fishing through her head constantly. So of course she kept forgetting that they were there.

"We know," the spirits hummed, sliding over her skin like a cool reptile. They didn't know everything, but she didn't know everything either. They knew what she knew. They just didn't know what it was they knew about what she knew. Crap, she needed to stop figuring this out.

"Are you going to tell them?" she asked. For all she knew, it had been telling them everything already.

It was silent, aloof, sheltered in the wake of her question. Rita tried to fight her panic down when suddenly there was a bright flash of energy and thought and pain surrounding her, as if electricity had shot across the surface of a bubble with her in the middle.

o-o-o

As Raven opened the door, he heard the whine of something somewhere in the house and his heart stopped. It was only for a moment, one moment of noise and heat and force, but he felt it stop and instead of its angry vibration in his chest, there was only a sharp stab of ice and he was thrown off his feet, the door bowling him over like an angry bull.

Judith had been just behind him and Raven saw her twist in mid-air above him, forcing her body into an arc to avoid a shaft of pillar as it sliced toward her. It was beautiful, as Judy always was. Then she landed and Raven almost felt rather than herd the crack as the bone snapped messily.

Judy didn't cry out, didn't make a sound. She staggered for a moment, then crumpled.

"Judith!" Raven called, but it only came out as a hoarse croak. His lack of actual pulse was screaming in his ears and his shoulder was definitely bruised from impact, if not actually broken. Never mind that though: he was still alive. He struggled to his feet, his legs wobbling but supporting him. The door was scorched and shattered into several pieces scattered around him.

Judith wasn't unconscious, but was struggling to get her leg propped up above her heart, to keep the blood loss down. Raven pulled off the Schwann brigade cape and twisted it around her thigh, pulling it tight against the bleeding where shards of bone had stabbed through her skin.

"Let's get this taken care of and I'll find Estelle," he muttered to her, trying to ignore the way her slightly silvery blood was coating his hands. He didn't have any gels on him like he normally would. He remembered he was still hungover. He was bleeding too, he could see the dark red among the silvery red, but he didn't have the time to find out from where.

"Oh, I wouldn't want to bother her," Judy coughed, forcing a smile that was more of a grimace.

"Nonsense," Raven bantered mindlessly, keeping a bloody hand on her shoulder but raising his eyes to peer through the haze of smoke and his own watering eyes. There were people approaching -some headlong, some cautiously - and he stood up defensively.

"Are you all right, sir?" a young noble, his hair tousled and matted with sweat.

"I'm fine," Raven growled, ignoring the ringing in his ears and the blood on his face and his aching shoulder. Judy's spear was just out of her reach and he nudged it toward her with his foot, but she didn't take it. She acknowledged it with a tightening of her lips, but she straightened up the best she could and surveyed the newcomers.

"Oh heavens," said a frail old woman who rather shocked Raven at coming out, as she was leaning heavily on a cane and picking her way heartily around rubble. "Doctor Olimar will be so upset when he gets back."

"Do you know the doctor?" Raven asked, scrambling over to her. She beamed up at him, peering through thick cataracts.

"Oh yes, he's wonderful," she prattled and he wasn't sure if she knew exactly what was going on. Though he had run into a fair number of elders who were quite a bit sharper than they let on - Brave Vesperia thought he was one, thirty six years be damned - and so he wasn't going to write her off immediately.

"Is there anyone who might have wanted to hurt him?" Raven's uniform was battered and bloody, but he was going to milk the persona if he could.

"No, no, I can't imagine so." She seemed rather concerned with the condition of his shoes - she kept peering at them. "He's been on holiday the past few weeks. Fortunate that the poor dear wasn't here. But now he's got no home to come back to. Perhaps I could have him stay with me." A happy little giggle escaped from her at the thought. Raven wasn't fazed.

"Wait, he hasn't been here in a few weeks?" Balfour had said that he had been speaking with Olimar recently, since the maid had seen Raven in the bath. That itself had only been a few weeks ago. It felt like so much longer. A lifetime.

"No, and we've all been missing him so terribly." The old woman tucked her hands up against her chest the way Estelle did, wavering for a moment without the support of her cane. Raven fought the urge to narrow his eyes at her as he considered her.

"Do you by any chance know where the good doctor has gone? We need to find him and warn him that his life is in danger." It was all bullshit, but it was good bullshit. Blowing up your own house after there had already been an explosive attempt on someone in the castle was a good way to both remove yourself from suspicion and make yourself out to be someone worth noticing.

"Oh, he's got a private hot springs up North. It was his father's. He makes an appointment for those of us able to travel at least once a year. It's lovely."

"You've been most helpful, madame," Raven forced out as he straightened and the movement sent a web of shot nerves down his back. Judith didn't move from where she was bleeding out on the shattered cobblestone. Her anntennae twitched as she met Raven's eyes.

"Ba'ul says he's ready to go."

o-o-o

The most damaging part of the explosion was the panic. Inside the palace, there were probably people who had been hurt by the blast. Down on the ground, it was the people milling around that were hurting each other. Estelle had chosen to set up shop in the most intense throng of people, where they were stepping on each other or getting into paranoid scuffles , or still bleeding from rubble raining down on them. It was a nightmare to stay close to her, being jostled by stretchers or pestered by guards, or asked to help carry blankets.

When the second explosion went off, the whole crowd shifted and stampeded like a herd of frightened sheep, pushing and shoving each other - some trying to get to the scene and others trying to get as far away as possible. Yuri was almost knocked over as someone shoved past and Karol shouted indignantly as he was carried away several yards by the press of bodies. Yuri snapped around and snatched Estelle up in a bear hug. She squeaked as he pressed her against the base of a statue in the middle of the courtyard, forming a protective barrier around her with his arms and back, keeping her safe from the panicking mass.

"Y-Yuri," she stammered, her hands up at her throat, looking up at him with wide frightened eyes. Someone was screaming in his ear, but Yuri tried to put on a smile for the princess.

"Hey there," he said as calm and cool as he could manage. "Come here often?" He struggled to keep a cough down as someone's shoulder slammed into his ribs and instead growled it out in his throat. Estelle's cheeks flushed pink and Yuri blinked. Oh no.

Someone fell bodily onto him and Yuri braced his arms against crushing Estelle. He growled again, this time a little hack making its way out. One of Estelle's hands turned between them and rested lightly on his chest, her gloved pinky touching the bare skin at his collar. Shit. Shit shit shit.

"Are you all right?" she asked. He could barely hear her above the roar of the crowd, but he saw her lips move to form the words.

"We need to get out of here," he shouted back. "You can't stay here."

"These people need me, Yuri," she answered stubbornly.

"You are the one they are trying to get at!"

"They aren't trying to blow me up," Estelle screamed back, making her voice heard above the guards shouting for people to calm down. "Why would I be in the noble quarter?" She wrestled her hand out from between them - not the hand that was gently pressed to his chest - and pointed at the new column of black smoke streaming out from the far side of the noble quarter.

Yuri didn't turn around to look. He'd seen it when the noise had ripped through the chatter and echoed off walls and streets. She was right.

"The explosion in the castle isn't even anywhere near my chambers!" Estelle continued, her hand now going up to point at the castle. "They aren't after me. I'm still here! Rita's the one who's missing!"

Now her eyes were bright with tears. Shiiiiit.

"Estelle, you -"

"Yuri, I'm the only magical healer still available in the world right now and I'm not allowed to be where people are being hurt all the time. So when people are hurt right in front of me, I'm going to help them! If you want to stop me, you are going to have to carry me away from here."

He almost did. He almost did. She was small and soft and even though he knew what she was capable of, he was pretty sure that she wouldn't hurt him if he grabbed her now and took her somewhere safe, somewhere secluded. But with the look on her face, how determined and angry and almost disappointed in him, he just couldn't. This is what she wanted.

"What kind of princess would I be if I left these people here?" she continued, clearly trying to get everything out as if he were going to interrupt her. As if he would interrupt her. "You can't do everything, Yuri. If you think you can go help, then go. I'll be fine here."

Yuri stared at her.

"I-"

"Look!" someone shouted at their side. Yuri didn't. Everyone was yelling at everyone to look at something. He didn't want to look at anything else.

But Estelle's eyes flicked up for a moment and her hand - soft and burning him through his shirt - lifted to muffle a gasp.

"Ba'ul," he said and then Yuri did look up. The entelexia swooped overhead, swift and silent, the rush of his tail's undulation making Yuri's ears pop. He twisted around to see more clearly and Estelle stepped away from the cage of his arms.

"Does Judith know something?" Karol had found them again, his hammer out again and his clothes and hair rumpled.

"Dunno," Yuri said. He wasn't quite sure why the sight of the Fierta against the backdrop of smoke made his eyes sting. "Either way, she's leaving us behind."

o-o-o

Ba'ul had helped Rita design a quick-harness system a few months before, when it had become clear that Brave Vesperia was fastest method of transport for refugees and supplies. The thing was just a couple of massive posts and crude prototypes of clamps for now, with promises of something more elaborate and permanent once the funding and time could be found, but it held the Fierta in a cradle with the chains held up so all Ba'ul had to do was swoop in and click the latches into the place with his weight. By the time Raven got there, Ba'ul was hovering impatiently, since there was nowhere else for Fierta to land safely close by. As the archer scrabbled up the ladder - rickety and slipshod in the haste to build it, but already worn and oiled along its rungs from use, and dammit but it was hard to climb up with one good arm - a low questioning rumble rattled the chains.

"She's fine," Raven assured him. He didn't understand Ba'ul's rumbles the way Judy did, but as the Fierta hardly ever went anywhere without her, the entelexia's question was not hard to figure out. "You okay to go?"

Ba'ul responded by lurching into the hair the minute Raven's boots hit the deck.

"I assume ya know where yer goin'," Raven grouched, rubbing his jaw to alleviate the pain of his teeth jolting together and the way his spine collapsed into itself and made his entire back scream. But that was the extent of his complaining. The entelexia was fast and they were on their way. Even if this ended up being a dead end, a detour of an hour or so was better than the days it would take to organize a search party officially. And Ba'ul would keep a running commentary to Judy the whole time. If Raven died out here, at least they would know where to start looking.

Yuri was going to kill him for setting off without him. But they were on their way.

It wasn't long though before Raven realized he had nothing to do once he had slung up a makeshift sling. Ba'ul knew better than he did where they were going and when it was flying, the Fierta didn't need ropes tightened or decks swabbed or anything. There wasn't anyone else to talk to or plan anything out with, because Raven had done the boneheaded thing he always did and run off without any actual plan or backup and with a major injury to his person. Rita was going to kill him when he found her. Because, really, what idiot went running off without backup?

Ba'ul was no help either, y'know, beyond being the single fastest creature on the planet and willing to help whenever he was asked. Raven had no doubt as to the entelexia's knowledge and wisdom, but without Judy there to translate, his growls and moans were so much noise that vibrated through Raven's teeth and made his already splitting headache worse. He clenched his jaw and tried to bear with it though; it wasn't Ba'ul's fault that Raven had drunk himself into a blind stupor last night.

Oh hell, this was so stupid. This was the stupidest thing he had ever done. His hands were shaking now and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He hadn't had anything to eat since the night before and he'd heaved that all over the horrendously expensive carpet of his room. But he was too nauseous to take anything out of the Fierta's galley and so all he could do was chew on a stale gel he had found in one of the lockers and fight to keep from gagging. He hadn't bathed and could feel the borrowed uniform that was too tight in the chest clinging to his back and underarms with sweat old and new. He was trying to think of a rescue plan. He really was. Scout out the area and find a weak spot. Have Ba'ul land a ways away and lead a false trail. Raven tried to squeeze the shakes out of his hands by gripping the shaft of one of his bows from the weapons cache.

But nothing was working and instead all Raven could think about was what he might have said to Rita when she took him back to his room and the look on LeBlanc's face as Raven... no - Schwann - had asked for his help. Why had he brought that bastard back? Why was he doing any of this?

He didn't remember a lick of what had happened between him and Rita except again that vague sensation of fingers in his hair and the feeling in the pit of his stomach that he had said something stupid, something forbidden, something he had made himself promise never to say to anyone. But for the life of him, he couldn't remember what it was.

But it had been Rita and she hadn't killed him, so whatever it was, maybe things weren't so hopeless. He just had to find her and make sure he apologized before she told him what it was. He just had to find her and then maybe she would owe him and maybe she wouldn't hit him so much. He just had to find her, so that she could go back to her work and stay out of politics the way she always wanted to do.

He just had to find her.

o-o-o

"Where the hell is she going?" Yuri asked no one as Ba'ul came swooping up overhead again from the Fierta's port and was out of sight within seconds. Beside him, Repede snorted suddenly and slipped into the crowd like a one-eyed ghost.

"Where the hell are you going?" Yuri called after him, but the dog didn't even look back.

Yuri got his answer quick enough though. A flustered and dusty noble was approaching Estelle, reverent but impatient.

"Lady Estelle!" he was calling. "We need your help!"

"Help for what?" Yuri interjected, putting himself between the noble and Estelle, but the princess pushed him aside, gentle but firm.

"How can I help?" she asked, not even looking at Yuri.

"It's Lady Judith!"

"Judy?" Estelle's surprise twisted her face. Yuri frowned. Judith could kick his ass with an arm and leg tied behind her back. What had she tangled with. And if she needed Estelle's help here, where had Ba'ul gone on his own?

The answers didn't come fast enough for him, but it wasn't really all that long of a wait. Judith was borne to Estelle on something of a litter formed by adoring and concerned fans, while Estelle's path was cleared by shouting guards and Yuri's sharp elbows.

Judy looked bad. Poised and calm and just as easy on the eyes as always, but bad. Her face was sheet white and even though she was smiling, Yuri could see the tendon standing out in her neck as she clenched her teeth. Her leg was shattered, smooth skin mottled with dark instant bruises and bloody holes. The whole thing lay at a crooked angle and Yuri was surprised everyone who jostled it as the carried her hadn't lost hands yet.

"Oh Judy," Yuri heard Estelle breathe as the princess reached out as if to touch the kritya's leg, but held back to hover her fingers over the beaten skin.

"What did you do to yourself?" Yuri demanded. He was feeling useless, his palms sweaty and way, way too many people around to keep an eye on. Judith's leg was a wreak and Ba'ul had left as though someone knew something.

"Judy!" Karol had appeared out of nowhere - he had been conscripted what felt like hours ago to help pass out blankets - "But if you're down here, where did Ba'ul go - omigosh, your leg! What happened?"

"Captain Schwann took the monster!" some enthusiastic and entirely unhelpful voice piped up. "I saw him! It must be some secret mission!"

Yuri gritted his teeth as the whispers of Captain Schwann being back swept through the group, an undercurrent to the hubbub of the explosions. What the hell was the old man up to?

With the first golden rush of Estelle's power sinking into her leg, Judy sat up a little straighter and her leg looked closer to the proper shape. She put a hand out to stop Estelle just as the arcs of light were beginning to form again for a second wave.

"Save it for someone else," Judith said, her voice quiet.

"But-"

And of course, in the middle of all that, is when Flynn finally decided to arrive, flanked by an entire brigade in neat formation politely shoving people out of the way.

"Where the hell have you been?" Yuri yelled at the commandant, not leaving Estelle's side.

"Doing my duty," Flynn replied tersely, not even looking at Yuri. Instead, he bowed slightly to Estelle.

"M'lady, I would really rather you were somewhere safe."

"I know," Estelle said, ignoring Judy's second murmured protest to sink another wave of gold into the kritya's leg, sealing the worst of the holes and fading most of the bruises. "But I'm staying here."

"Very well," Flynn aquiesqued, causing Yuri to blink and stare. "Then I'm sure you won't mind if we set up a first aid station around you? It appears that this is our best location option anyway."

"What about Rita?" Yuri demanded. "The old man's apparently gone and run off on his own."

Flynn did look at him then, but it was as if he wasn't even seeing Yuri. He was focused and calm, but his brows were furrowed.

"Without knowing where Miss Mordio is, we will have to conduct an investigation and organize and search party."

"Raven knows where she might be being kept," Judith said quietly. "Ba'ul can let me know where they are going."

"Yes, he's taking Ba'ul as well," Flynn said thoughtfully, as if confirming it to himself.

"Ba'ul wanted to go," Judy said, still mild, almost lost beneath the continued noise, but her eyes sharp.

Flynn seemed not to hear. He turned to his followers and began pointing and giving out directions to set up a safe haven and form a perimeter around the princess and wounded. At least he was thinking in terms of the continued danger, Yuri grudgingly conceded. The crowd, no matter what Estelle thought, was dangerous. But now that Flynn was here, Yuri wouldn't be able to spirit her away, even if she was willing. The commandant wasn't going to let the princess out of his sight.

"So what," Yuri heard Karol ask. "Are we supposed to stay here and wait?"

"Raven took Ba'ul," Yuri forced out through gritted teeth. "We're hours behind him already with him flying. So yeah, we sit here and wait."

Estelle was looking at him. He could feel it. He didn't meet her gaze, but instead rewrapped the strap of his scabbard around his hand. He hated waiting.

_A/N: There's a lot more to come, but I've been busy and you have been waiting too long. _


	9. Chapter 9

Raven was a patient man. He was a spy, yes. Meddled, yes. But mostly he was content to watch. To tag along and make snarky yet charming comments, but just to wait and see what happened was usually the extent of his involvement and he could do so with a cool head. But leaning with his back to the creaking wheel, with his shoulder on fire and his stomach twisting, he had never been more impatient in his life.

It came of being alone. Raven didn't spend much time alone anymore. In fact, he couldn't think of much time he had spent alone since getting the rock put in his chest. There had always been Alexei or the Schwann brigade or the Don. If not them, then it was a rowdy group in a pub or a flirtatious waitress or whatever local kids in a town that wanted to play tag. And then it had been Brave Vesperia, with Yuri's constant verbal sulking, Ba'ul and Judith's hum, and Karol's moments of self-doubt. Even at night, they had more often than not been huddled around a campfire, or next door in thin-walled inn rooms.

Raven didn't like being alone. Being alone left him with only his thoughts for company. And that made him anxious.

It was why he had taken to spending time with Rita in the first place. Since Brave Vesperia's journey had ended, Judy was always out and about with Ba'ul and Raven had had enough of high adventure to last him a while, so 'no thank you' to be accompanying them. Yuri was surly and prickly, but the real reason Raven didn't hang out with him was that he was always with Estelle and Raven knew enough about third wheels to avoid being one. Karol was no better with Nan. Plus, other people liked Karol. He was always at some guild meeting or another, proving that he actually had a head on his shoulders. Raven just sort of faded into the background then as the kid bent over a map with his tongue between his teeth.

Somewhere along the line, Raven realized, he had made friends. Not just people to shout his name when he entered a large gathering or offer to buy him a beer, but people who he actually wanted to be around. Except that they were all busy, and without a grand quest for him to be actually useful, he was just doing what he had always been doing - tagging along. Ol' Raven wasn't in too much demand. He didn't have Estelle's public image or Karol's expertise or even Yuri's no-nonsense approach to recommend him to much of anything. With Alexei and his clandestine needs of Schwann no more, and the Don's errands at their end, Raven was no longer invaluable. He was invited to meetings and people asked him questions, but he wasn't indispensable anymore. Sure, some of the guilds knew him and would call out to him on the streets or shake his hand in the hall, but he was just the Don's errand boy to them. He wasn't anything at all to the Empire - Schwann's death had seen to that. Six years ago, six months ago, he would have prayed for that. And yet...

What the hell was he doing? He was alone, and not even sure what he was up against. Had he been on top of things, had he actually been thinking, he would have at least gotten some sturdy guild members to back him up in case of a scuffle. Rita was going to kill him if he found her.

Raven found that he couldn't stand up anymore. His knees wouldn't let him. So he sat down. As he did, he found that his hands were shaking. So he put them in his pockets. Just cold. The temperature was always lower the higher you went. Less oxygen too, which was why it was suddenly hard to breathe. He hunched forward in a little ball, trying to keep the heat in and hiccuping gently as he tried to inhale past the tears. Tears from the wind. It was cold and dry. His eyes were just trying to compensate.

Ba'ul rumbled something quietly and Raven regretted again that he didn't have Judy to translate.

"'m sorry," he said all the same to the entelexia. "I didn' quite catch that."

Ba'ul sang again, but it didn't sound urgent. Just... soothing.

Raven wiped his sleeve under his nose and tucked his hand back against his chest. Rita was an important asset to the people in general, no matter what group they were part of. Sure, the world could carry on without her, but it was going to be so much easier if she were there to help with the mana and electricity conversions. But with the distractions at the palace, no one would be after her too quickly. That was likely what her kidnappers were thinking. Because good guild members and soldiers alike would be helping out those in immediate need. Good guild members and soldiers alike wouldn't leave the city in chaos to go after one mage when there were people bleeding in the streets.

Schwann wouldn't have left the castle full of frightened and injured citizens, a problem in front of him that he could fix, to go on a wild goose chase with no information and no backup. It was something he had instilled in his men. And they would have listened. They would have learned.

Which is why Leblanc had left him. Which is why Leblanc had gone without him. Because Leblanc knew. Leblanc, for all of his blustering and his drinking and his loud mouth and damned, dogged stubbornness, knew who it was that he respected and who he followed and even though he knew who Raven was, he knew who Raven wasn't. Raven wasn't Schwann. Oh he could posture and shave and slick his hair down, but Schwann had died in that collapse. Everything else would always be a pale shadow of that man.

Shit.

He had to find her.

Ba'ul interrupted the spiraling train of ridiculous thoughts with a hum. Raven wiped more of the wind tears from his cheeks and lifted his head as if to make eye contact with something whose eyes were at least forty feet in front and below him.

"What's up?

o-o-o

Rita's mind was sprinting through information, the only thing that she could still partly control. There was something going on outside. The white hot pain had shot through her and then vanished, but it wasn't her body that was being hurt. It was like it was being relayed through her on its way to something else, just sort of brushing by on a rampage to something else. It had been the old man's hurt that she had felt, because she had felt the unnatural hum of his blood rather than the thump thump thump of her own, and no one's joints should ache that much.

The spirits - and through them, she - had somehow formed a connection to Raven. He had touched something, or entered something that was being supervised. It was some kind of security measure or watchdog set up. So he was looking for her. She'd seen in his head for those brief seconds between his arrival and his departure. She'd seen herself in his mind as the spirits dissected those moments in front of her. And he'd stumbled across something. And now he was gone.

The spirits were arguing about it, in whispers that weren't actually whispers, but were more just vague accusations and hurt feelings and flitting moments of biting clarity that was all nearly incoherent in the way a whisper would be in normal conversation. It was distracting and it was distressing. She couldn't catch just what it was that had happened to him - and something had happened, it wasn't like he had just stepped out of the space - but at the very least, the spirits couldn't see him anymore.

They could sense her trying to figure things out, but they were curious too, maybe almost worried, and so they weren't stopping her. Maybe they were hoping she could shed some light on things. It made her nervous too, because she wasn't sure if her own mind would be left vulnerable and they were just waiting to strike, but sitting around in a mental brick room never solved anything, and so she probed.

The spirits were the first conundrum to figure out. There were two of them, light and dark. It was the dark one that kept her trapped and the light that kept digging through her brain to find the tidbits they wanted. And their power...

The shock of realization that they were summon spirits was easily concealed. She should have figured that out earlier if she hadn't been distracted by her predicament and so a brief spurt of self-disgust and she was over it. But if they had been summoned, bound and named as Undine and Gnome and the others had been, then who was controlling them?

That realization shook the spirits so profoundly that for a moment, it was as if the sphere went thin and she could almost sense snatches of the people beyond. She grabbed onto as many as she could before the spirits rearranged and she was in the dark again.

_she wanted to get out of the dark - the others teased her and it was stupid, but she didn't want to be in the dark anymore - she didn't even know how long it had been anymore_

_no, shit, stop it - get ahold of yourself_

More than one. Working in tandem? Did they have some device, the controllers? Or were they doing this willingly, the spirits? Were they in on it? But the way the spirits had reacted to the thought, it was as if the thought that they were being used like tools had never occurred to them. So were they? The spirits latched onto this train of thought and Rita let them. That momentary lapse in concentration had been promising. It had made the ones outside nervous.

o-o-o

Olimar leaned forward as the readouts spiked. A little concern was normal, but it had to be rectified quickly.

"A genius she may be, but her reasoning is a little far-fetched at times," he muttered, quiet enough that no one could physically hear him, but just loud enough that the thought reverberated through the sphere of consciousness that Aska had arranged throughout the building. The thought sent little waves of calm through the spirits as they absorbed it and began to work it out between them.

It was a relatively perfect symbiosis. Aska and Shadow, as they had been dubbed, the spirits encompassing light and dark, had never met before Olimar and his associate had introduced them. It was rather odd to think about really, that two such perfectly coexisting and opposing forces had never met.

That was the interesting thing about the spirits. As spirits, they were incorporeal, effectively everywhere at every time. So long as their chosen element of affinity was there, they could be contacted. But some were stronger than others. The spirit Gnome was a veritable god, with control over earthquakes and mountains, while the spirit of the blastia that had fertilized Olimar's garden was only a vague presence, barely able to form coherent thoughts. And some didn't seem aware of the power they had, or would simply linger in the places where they had lived in life or worked as blastia. And so, no matter their omnipotence or actual range, if they had decided they would not move, they would not move.

Aska had been angry at his predicament. Furious even. The ground had been dried and burnt from his exposure and convincing him to even speak to a human or krytian had been a task and a half. Olimar's partner was no longer able to see anything but vague shapes and shadows since approaching Aska, as the light had been so intense. It had been worth it, they had said, but Olimar was intensely grateful that his lot had fallen to speaking with Shadow. It had simply been cool and damp in the cave that the spirit had practically been terrified of leaving the cave where its apatheia had fallen hundreds of years ago. It didn't even take convincing, just a sharp bout of bullying and the spirit was under his sway. Both a blessing and a curse, as Mordio had nearly ruined everything simply by shouting at the spirit. Shadow had almost caved right then and there if Aska hadn't been able to keep it together and if Olimar hadn't been there to shout directions for the mage's containment. Shadow had a powerful effect, but a weak defense.

But the two spirits worked well together, Aska shedding light on one's mind and Shadow slipping into the dark, secret recesses of thought. Between the two of them, it was possible to draw out nearly any secret. And yet the mage was avoiding their analysis. Instead, all they were getting were disjointed memories and general feelings. No clear information or blueprints. Mordio's mind was not as straightforward as he had hoped, but no matter. A little more time for the spirits to understand the method to the mage's madness and they could perhaps let her out enough to ask her questions.

o-o-o

They were back inside her head. It was her fault. She'd been hoping that it would get her further in their heads, but if she had shaken them with her accusations, their resolve had come back stronger. She was blotted out as they crashed into her head.

They were after Raven. She'd decided that. They old man and his stupid heart. Those secrets were hidden always, but they knew. Else they wouldn't have kept probing at those memories.

The problem was that they were her memories, so they were only what she remembered from them. There were the checkups - sporadic and not nearly as often as they should have been but of course the old man was a stupid idiot of course and would hide when he didn't want to have his heart looked at no matter what the consequences of leaving it unmainteneced - but Rita just understood those things that she drew out of and put into those sessions. She didn't dwell on the the mechanical and blastia-realated minutia every time she swiped open a control panel, so whatever information they were getting there was piecemeal . But the memories they seemed to keep dwelling on were the dumbest thing.

Like the conversation she had with the old man while she dragged him back to his room. Well, less of a conversation and more him drunkenly rambling and her trying to decide if stepping on his foot would be worth the inconvenience it would cause when he tripped.

_"Th-they don' know shiiiit..." Raven drawled. His breath was laced with little spatters as he forced the air out between his teeth. Rita could see them in the lamplight as they sprayed over the dark hall floor. It was like watching little wet fireworks._

_"I work. I've been workin' since that 'lil shit was a twinkle in his daddy's eye. 'm tired, 's all. I'm just a deadbeat who's dead-tired. E'ryone always - hic gah - always lookin' to make me do their damn dirty work. I jus don'wanna anymore. I've seen too much of - of everything. Th-the things I know? Oh Rita darlin', I would tell you if I weren' so dru-hic-nk."_

_She had to give him some credit for that. Just a smidge. He knew how to keep a secret. Falling off his ass wasted and he would yammer on and on about everything, but you'd never get any real information out of him._

_She had to wonder how he'd developed that skill, what he'd seen that he had to learn it or die._

_She wasn't nearly as good. She blurted things out, showed off, bossed people around, let spirits wander around inside her head..._

With a wrench, she managed to focus her attention on them and they retreated a little. But she had made them nervous and she could feel the efforts to redouble and reattack.

Now it was some meeting that Brave Vesperia had been invited to attend, a briefing on the suspected Alexei loyalists and what particular methods should be used to contain them. Raven hadn't shown up. Rita didn't want to be there either, so with the excuse that she would go find the lazy asshole, she stormed out of the meeting.

_She hadn't been planning on finding him. She hadn't even been looking. And yet she'd stumbled across him - almost literally stumbled over him - as she rounded a corner. He was sitting with his back against the wall, boots buried in the thick shag carpet and his hands behind his head as if he were comfortably sunbathing instead of in the bowels of the castle's government halls._

_"Playin' hooky, genius mage?" he asked, without actually looking at her, just glancing up through his eyebrows._

_"I'm looking for you actually," she huffed, sticking to her alibi. "Where the hell have you been?"_

_"See, it's a tricky thing, tryin' ta root out the Alexei loyalists when ya might have been one yerself once upon a time. Sort of a kinda loyalty, kinship if you will, that ya feel. Ya hear me? Kind of muddies the waters and whatnot."_

_"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Rita said, because at the time she hadn't learned to listen to him. Hadn't learned that sometimes, even though he really, really was an idiot, sometimes he said things that he actually meant, but in such a way that you thought he was covering for some other story._

Shit. Was that really how she thought sometimes? Was it the spirits analyzing her memories and her catching the feedback, or was she thinking that herself? She couldn't tell and she didn't like it. Rita was not given to looking back over the past. To compare experiments to previous results, sure. Science couldn't progress without a solid foundation. But anything else was just stupid. You couldn't change other people, so why really bother trying to change yourself? It would either happen or it wouldn't, and time only went forward, so what was the point of retrospection of what you could have said or how you used to think?

She was tired of this. If they would just ask her some questions, maybe she would answer them. If they would just let her out of the dark, maybe she would talk...

But no, there they were again, plunging into another memory.

_She had been standing next to him the moment the spirits had converted after that final battle, the moment when his blastia gave out. So it was her shoulder that he fell onto, her forehead he clocked soundly with his chin. And it was her voice that dominated the panicked clamor that began._

_"Estelle, I need you!"_

_She knew what it was instantly. She'd been expecting it, watching his face for the moment when the pump stopped doing its job. He froze for the briefest of moments, and then his hand went to his chest._

_"I need you to keep up a steady stream," Rita shouted at Estelle, "just enough to keep things - oh shut up, Karol! - going for a second."_

_She tried not to look too eager as she shoved aside his heavy overcoat and his thin undershirt. Shed been wanting to see the blastia since Baction - no, don't think about_ that_ right_ now - _and wasn't it just irony that she couldn't just touch it until it was broken. Peachy, old man, just peachy._

_"Yuri, put your finger right there. There, moron. Don't let go. Judy, I need a knife."_

_He'd met her eyes as he fell, for one brief seond, just as his knees gave out. He looked... surprised. It had surprised her which is why she know had a goose egg at her temple._

_He wasn't quiet unconscious, but he wasn't fully awake either. He twitched and his eyes rolled back into his head, but nothing came out of his mouth. Sweet blessed silence. Now if only Karol would quit sobbing._

_"Dammit, Karol, be quiet. He's not going to die."_

_With the blastia heart not pumping the blood through, the blood itself just oozed out of the incisions Rita slit along the edges of the device. She refused to think about how here she wa on the top of the biggest building in the world in the freezing cold wind, cutting open a man's chest. Maybe later, if she decided she needed more accomplishments to intimidate people with._

_"Yuri, move, you're blocking my light. No, don't take your finger off!"_

_His movements grew slower as she swiped a hand over him and opened a control panel. If he'd let her look at the damn thing before this, she could have had a formula already. It already ran off him mostly already, she just needed to reroute it from ambient spirit energy to mana, but without specifics, she was running mostly blind. When she fixed him, she was going to let him know how stupid he was. Fortunately, she was a genius and she at least had enough sense to plan ahead._

_That had been the other thing in his eyes as he had fallen: trust. Trust that she was going to save him. Because, down deep, nearly hidden beneath everything else in that moment of contact, there'd been fear. He didn't want to die._

_She was going to kill him._

_"Estelle, call Undine please." Seriously, the princess was being the only useful one. At least Judith had been proactive and knelt on on Raven's shoulders to keep him still. Rita hoped that he'd fallen deeper into unconciousness, or else they were never going to hear the end of how he'd gotten between Judith's thighs. And Rita wouldn't be able to hit him for a while, not until she was sure things were working properly._

_"Undine, you can handle any liquid so long as it's water-based, right?_

_And then it was done. It'd taken two minutes, a dozen keystrokes. It was almost insultingly easy. Which was good, Because then Rita remembered that they'd just saved the world and she was completely run dry of magic and she was covered in blood that wasn't all Raven's. She was just glad that Raven was definitely unconscious, or else she would never hear the end of how she slumped over onto his chest - all bloody and sweaty and newly recalibrated blastia whirring cheerily under her ear - and fell asleep._

_Waking up was almost as bad though. She knew here he was before she opened her eyes - the creaks and moans of the Fierta had become almost home, almost comforting, heights be damned. But there was someone hovering over her, someone ... tucking her in. More just straightening the blanket, but ... tucking her in._

_To hell not hitting him._

_"What the hell are you doing, you damn pervert?"_

_Her fist connected soundly with his jaw and he was lucky she'd gone for the jaw because his chest had actually been closer. As it was, he reeled backwards, stumbling away._

_"Ow, ow, oh, ish tha' any way to trea' an inshured man, Rita darlin'?" he moaned, lisping around the immediate swelling from a bitten tongue._

_"The hell are you doing up, old man? You know I had to cut your chest open, right?"_

_"Yeah, uh, thanks for that." He prodded his cheek tenderly, then gave her a sloppy thumbs up. "I really owe ya one, huh?"_

_She didn't miss the way his chest went white at the knuckles, or the way he almost touched his chest and then tried to cover up the guesture with a grand sweeping bow._

_"Whatever," she snapped. "Where is everyone? Why are you here?" She kicked off the sheet and stood up, pointing back at the bed. He obediently slunk towards it and flopped onto the mattress. Face-down on the pillow, voice muffled, he just shrugged and muttered into the fluff before refusing to respond again._

_"Thanks, genius mage."_

o-o-o

Olimar leaned back in his chair with a pleased smile. They would get her this next wave. The mage was taking longer than he had been expecting - this process was usually almost instantateous, but with her, a high intellect was creating quite a maze for the spirits to muscle their way through - but they were worming their way in. Even if the results about the blastia were a bit disappointing, they had plenty of time to dig through the minutae. Already, the mage's notes and files were far more coherent with the added insight. Another hour perhaps? The loss of his house had been far worth the information gathered in such a short time. Months of suffering would be avenged and years of future chaos could be eliminated. The mage had brought this on herself by being calcitrant, and unwilling to see the plight of the spirits.

Aska crackled with agreement, attention temporarily pulled away from the mage by Olimar's self-indulgent musings. The doctor quickly snapped his attention to the task at hand. An hour, maybe a little more if Miss Mordio continued to prove a challenge, and they would have what they wanted. However, a litle politeness could go a long way and if they could get what they wanted without having to completely scramble her brain, the mage would be a bit more useful in the future.

o-o-o

Another person entered the sphere, as solidly and surely as if it had walked into a room, body intact.

"Hello, Miss Mordio." The voice sounded like an actual voice, not a whisper or a vague thought, and Rita instantly started chanting incantations, though she knew immediately they weren't going to work. The humming presence was still draped over her skin and she still couldn't move. Her mouth hadn't actually been moving, she couldn't feel the muscles working. The voice simply waited for her to stop and then continued.

It was an older voice, not old but deep and mature, a woman's voice.

"Miss Mordio, why is it that you are one of the few that can still use magic? You, who destroyed the blastia?"

Rita didn't bother to think of an answer.

"Who the hell are you?" Her voice was almost tangible, but only because she was wrestling all of her energy into making it coherent. It still leaked emotions and memories at the seams, like a fraying rope losing fibers as she threw it towards the woman's presence. In contrast, the woman's voice was as smooth and solid as if she were standing there, each word an iron-clad bullet of concise meaning, as unscrutable as Yuri's face when was thinking about doing something he probably shouldn't.

"My name is Beatrice," the woman said. "We've never met before, but I've heard a great deal about you in the past few months. Nothing too exceptional, just another of those so-called heroes who uprooted everything."

Rita was surprised at how hard it as not to bristle at the slight. Was she really that proud? Had she always been like that? In Aspio, if the mages had made a comment, she wouldn't even have noticed, so absorbed in her work. She just didn't have anything to bury herself in here, because everything here was dangerous.

"We would have likely paid little attention to you if that spy you keep company with had not revealed his blastia. How long have you been hiding that from the world? The secret to your magic abilities. You don't have one yourself, we checked. But you created that one in his chest, didn't you? You brought Captain Schwann back to life with that rock, didn't you?"

Rita realized then that she wasn't being held by some great master genius with a plan for world domination and destruction. They would have known all this already, been planning for months. This was just a desperate woman looking for hope who had gotten her hands on some powerful tools. And that was far, far more frightening. It was like giving Karol a flamethrower to go after a cockroach.

She tried to tamper down the realization, but she knew that the woman knew. But maybe playing dumb would frustrate her into telling Rita something useful, something she could use.

"Why don't you ask him?" Rita asked, trying to stall while she thought of something clever to say that would actually accomplish those goals. The buzzing was making it hard to think, buzzing as it was around the inside of the sphere.

"He's clearly an idiot now. You may be able to bring people back, but they came back wrong. For such a good mage, that's a rather large oversight, don't you think? We may bring him in for study, but a halfwit wouldn't be any use for any larger information."

Raven was too good at this, Rita couldn't help but think. She was angry, she realized. She told herself it was just that his stupidity had gotten her into this mess instead of him like he deserved.

"I don't know what you're talking about," the mage ground out, trying to keep her voice fairly level. I didn't make that brilliant perversion of a blastia. "What blastia?"

The pain was instant, fleeting and scorching. Rita could only grunt - and it wasn't even a real noise, damn them - as it shot through her, firing every connection between her skin and the humming.

"It would be unwise to lie to me, Miss Mordio. I'm sorry for these precautions, but I have no choice. Do you know how many people have died because of your selfishness? I know he has a blastia and I know that you yourself claimed responsibility for it."

Damn it all to hell. The day when that idiot made a royal ass of himself in the bath. Didn't hep that she had had to go and open her mouth trying to keep the damage to a minimum. She should have just let him taken the fall.

Why was she thinking about all of this? It was like she grown Estelle's sense of understand or something. No, it was just the spirits picking at her thoughts, finding points of weakness and drawing out whatever she'd been suppressing. Apparently she did a lot of suppressing of stupid things.

She realized the woman was waiting for her to say something, defend herself. She couldn't think of anything fast enough, couldn't make her brain work hard enough to come up with an answer. So the woman continued.

"We would like to ask you to work with us in developing a blastia similar, something that would work as the old blastia did, merge with existing technology and leave the spirits free of the obligation to run them."

Rita blinked, or as near as she could in the sphere.

"Are you serious?" For a moment, she could think, the buzzing subsided, but nothing useful came to mind. It was only the red hot sheet of anger burning away the restraints for a second. "Just how stupid can you really get?"

The woman was silent, her astonishment ringing through the sphere.

"Miss Mordio, I am asking you in person as a curtesy. If you do not -"

"Oh, right, because it's such a damn curtsey to kidnap me and probe my brain."

"Believe me, we have yet to 'probe' your brain. Shadow and Aska have been gentle and unobtrusive as of yet. Refuse to answer my questions or disregard my request and I will allow them to forget their manners."

Aska and Shadow. The names were familiar. Estelle would know them from some book. Were they just blastia gone rogue or were they Entelexia converted? It was hard to tell beyond the now damn familiar buzzing.

"Do you know who I am?" Rita demanded. "You really think I would do something so awful as what Alexei did to the Entelexia? You think I would create blastia just to serve my own needs, knowing what I know about them?"

"You had no problem using the blastia as you wanted while you trampled over world order. We are not thieves or tyrants, Miss Mordio. We simply want what is ours, what has been kept from us."

"Raven's blastia has nothing to do with you," Rita blurted out. Goddammit, genius mage, just go ahead and confess, why don't you?

"A working blastia? One that could protect the people and aid in recovery? I think that has everything to do with the people."

'The people'... this was starting to sound like the duke what's-his-face at the ball the night before. Was it the night before? She couldn't tell anymore. She could have been here a year for all she knew.

"Listen, you -" Rita began, but Beatrice cut her off.

"No, Miss Mordio, you are clearly not willing to listen to my questions. I have no choice but to get the answers I need."

That was apparently a signal, because the buzzing became a burrowing, as the two spirits sank their teeth in and began to chew their way through Rita's brain. It was as if all her skin had been pulled off, leaving her dry and exposed to a hot wind that sang between her tendons and slipped across her muscles.

The images were too fast, the emotions too great and the cycle too chaotic. She reached out, clawing at anything to make a difference, to stop the spinning. Rita just slipped through memory after fact, standing in the middle of text from a math book or floating overhead as she watched herself sleep under her desk. Raven's blastia, glimpses caught only in passing as he would take off his overcoat to let it dry after a rain, or the vague and coded scraps of schematics that had been recovered from Alexei's notes.

She realized that she couldn't feel herself breathing. Hadn't been able to feel it this whole time, trapped as she was in this sphere of the spirits where she couldn't even feel her clothing touching her skin. What if she was dead? Did they need her alive to do this? Maybe she was just a mind in here, like an Entelexia deep in a stone, and they were just drawing on her like a blastia. It would be kind of fitting, seeing all the things she had done in her life, but the thought wasn't exactly pleasant.

She had never thought about dying, even when standing on that tall, tall tower with Raven's head by her foot and his blood on her hands. That had just been a fear of failing, a fear of screwing this up, a fear of her friends dying. She knew that she would die, sure, but the hows and whys and good-byes weren't something she'd bothered about. But it hadn't occured to her that she might die with no fight in her, without any warning or ability to retaliate. If anything, she would have thought a blastia would kill her somehow. It would only have been fair.

It was dark, she realized again. And everything was spinning.

o-o-o

Judy tugged politely at Yuri's sleeve for his attention.

"Ba'ul's found something. It's like the field that Raven and I noticed at the house before the explosion. He doesn't know how to tell Raven, but he wants to investigate."

This is what you get for letting him go off alone, Judy, Yuri wanted to retort. She had been very clear that it had been Ba'ul's idea in the first place to take Raven and that she had completely agreed to let him go. But what had they been thinking? They couldn't have waited the five minutes it would have taken Estelle to fix Judy's leg and collect at least a few other people before they took off?

Except that Estelle was trying to save her strength to heal the dozens of injuries, many worse than Judy's, and Raven had a long, long history now of not telling people about his plans or motives.

"What are you telling me for?" Yuri snapped instead of saying what he wanted to say. "Raven's a smart guy. If Ba'ul wants to check something out on his own, great. The old man will figure it out."

o-o-o

"Where the hell are we going?" Raven shouted through the wind. "Please tell me it's something good."

As if in answer, there was the immediate sensation of warm sunshine and a crawling buzz on his skin. It was like the house, but ten - no - a hundred times stronger. They were close to... something. And whatever it was hurt.

The spell or force field or whatever it had been around the doctor's house had caused his heart to stutter and skip. This time it halted.

He felt the damn thing stop, felt the way the blood halted in his arteries, and he dropped to the deck. Consciousness was suddenly something he had to fight for. And he was losing. Down on the boards, his fingernails dug into the wood and he coughed and hacked until he couldn't actually inhale anymore and his vision blurred for long moments, fading in and out of black and fuzzy. He heard Ba'ul humming something in the background, but he couldn't make it out anyway and so he just let the big blue fuzzball groan while he tried to keep his eyeballs from popping out of his head and the rock from dropping out of his chest.

"H-hold on there, buddy," he wheezed, waving a hand that the entelexia wouldn't be able to see. "Gimme a sec."

But Ba'ul had no interest in waiting. He'd found something that interested him. Raven's ears popped and he saw white plumes of clouds go shooting by as they dropped out of the sky. Then he blacked out again.

o-o-o

Something had happened. Someone was near. The light in her head snapped on so quickly that her stomach lurched. The spinning, the digging, the dredging halted violently and she vomited. She was still strapped down though and so she couldn't lean forward to retch and so the remains of last night's champage and over-garnished hors d'oeurves went splattering down the front of her dress. Another heave, this one mostly just dribbles, slithered down her chin and the sides of her neck into her hair. But she didn't care, didn't give a damn, because she could feel it.

They were distracted.

She could see the ceiling.

She opened her mouth, not even bothering to spit.

"Gnome."

o-o-o

The explosion didn't wake Raven, but it was what he woke up to. Instead, it was the sudden overwhelming relief, the cotton pulled out of his lungs, the click whir of the rock's resurrection that the explosion brought that woke him. He couldn't see the explosion from his face-down position on the boards, but the whole ship rocked and Ba'ul groaned as the entelexia swerved away from the blast. Raven struggled to his feet and leaned out over the railing, his ears ringing from the enormous roar. The brown-grey pillar of smoke? dirt? was already rising into the air, but he looked just in time to watch the shock waves go galloping across the ground below.

"The hell is that?" he asked. But he had a pretty good idea, because his newly started heart was racing again.

They approached at a low bank, because whatever - or whoever - had caused the explosion had kicked up debris that was even now raining down out of the sky. Chunks of expensive-looking masonry, unidentifiable machine parts and once a nearly-intact statue of a partially-naked lady came down like overgrown hail and Raven was just as eager as Ba'ul to not get smushed. But Rita was down there. He knew it. She had to be.

But he had to wait, stop, think about it. She wouldn't have been at the hot springs, that was too convenient, too stupid, to actually put someone where people might go looking for you. But she'd been on the way? They'd actually been somewhere along the path one might follow to get there? Maybe that was why there was the field. A kind of alarm system. But why would it have triggered an explosion? The last one made sense - kill whoever was investigating the house, make the owners-slash-masterminds nothing but a pitiable victim of this catastrophe that was striking the capitol at random. But this, this was going to do nothing but draw attention to themselves. It was too far away to be played off as related to the capitol explosions. This whole mess reeked of sloppy, amateurish game-playing rather than any concentrated acts of war or terrorism. Raven had dealt with his fair share of those. Just because they were kids playing with daddy's daggers though, they had hold of Rita and had already likely killed quite a few people in their damned fireworks displays. The weasly little doctor, whatever his name was, back at Rita's lab, he was probably dead too.

So what was this down below? An accident? Way too big for that. Unless they had been doing something city-scale, even a mana or electric malfunction was unlikely to cause something like the cloud that was only just beginning to spread out and dissipate. Ba'ul moaned, a warning, and lurched down another twenty feet, causing Raven's ears to pop again. The air was clearing of dust and the outlines of a huge crater could be seen. It was 't scorched, or didn't look scorched, and Raven couldn't see any fires, but Ba'ul swung wide, heading for the outskirts to avoid any unstable ground or other hazards. Raven was going to have to approach on his own.

Any element of surprise, any advantage he might have had by being alone, he just now realized, he had blown by arriving by sky whale. Had he had his head together, he would have had Ba'ul land behind the mountains, or fly on by and only circle back once they had determined what was down there. Not like he wouldn't have been exposed by the force field or anything. And why the hell hadn't he thought that this would be their mode of operation and prepared for it? The thought of his heart again made him look down.

Oh shit.

He was bleeding. He wasn't sure how much of it was his blood and how much was Judith's - because hers was on him, that weird silvery stuff - but some of it was definitely his. Because hers was drying and his was still fresh. Because hers was on his sleeves and his was spreading in a wide circle around his chest.

He remembered that he was hungover, and he didn't even have his bow with him.

What the hell was he doing?

o-o-o

Gnome waited by her until she had shoved off what was left of the restraints on her legs and sat up. Then, apparently deciding he wasn't needed anymore, he just vanished. It would have been nice if he could have left her some steps though, seeing as how she had literally just dug herself a hole to stand in, and she was still in her high heels from the night before.

Whatever.

The dust made it hard to breathe and the smell of her own sick down her front didn't help much either and so for a long moment, she stood with her hands on her knees and spit gob after gob of gritty saliva until her mouth no longer tasted like bile or dirt and then she coughed a long, ragged cough that rattled through her whole ribcage. Then she had to wait until her ankles stopped wobbling - just from the shoes, that was all, just the shoes - so she could straighten up and when she finally did, she looked around at where she had ended up.

The table or bed or whatever she had been strapped to was still mostly intact, though Gnome had neatly sliced off the anchors for her restraints with rather elegant spires of rock. It was about the only delicate thing about the whole endeavor though. Good. When she had called Gnome, the thought hadn't been to be delicate.

She had to get out of this hole though. It wasn't deep necessarily, but the sides were steep. Whatever. Good reason to get rid of the shoes. Kicking the remains of their slinky straps off, she picked up each now-dangerous-looking footpiece- seriously, how were there not more dead people with these heels sticking out of their eye sockets? - and jammed it heel-first into the wall of earth in front of her. They went in easily, the dirt having been upheaved and aerated recently, but they also held fairly firm as she put a bare foot on one and climbed up.

At the top of the hole, she found that she couldn't stand up immediately. For whatever reason, her elbows were weak and so couldn't push her up high enough to facilitate getting her feet under her. So she waited for a minute or two, cursing her weak muscles under her breath. The dirt from the hole had caked in the vomit on her dress, dampening the smell a bit, so at least it was easier to breathe. Her eyes were watering though, so clearly there had to be some fumes still lingering. Or maybe it was the dust still in the air.

Whatever.

Finally she forced her right leg up under her chest, pushing herself up with her knee as much as with her arms. She nearly tripped on the hem of the stupid dress she was wearing and as it was, she dragged it down lower on her chest so that she had to hike it up haphazardly to keep from flashing the rubble.

What. Ever.

Gnome had been impressive as always. She hadn't had an exact thought in mind as to what she wanted him to do when she had called him, and she hadn't even chanted any sort of spell when he arrived, so whatever he'd done, he'd mostly done himself with whatever clues he might have gotten from her state of mind. The spirits were pretty good at that.

Now she barely remembered anything about those few seconds. The ground was nearly level outside of her hole, but it clearly had not been before, as it was nearly raked smooth by rubble and spirit energy in a plane any gardener would envy. Yards ahead and to the side of her, she could see the slopes of the bigger hole that she was in currently. The dirt under her bare feet was soft and almost pleasant, but she could see the sharp edges of debris scattered about not to far away. And under one of the larger chunks of what had once been a wall or a floor or something, there was a boot. Just an empty boot, with no sight of its owner anywhere.

There wasn't anything left in her stomach, but she heaved all the same. It was just a cough and a gag and then she was done, but then she stood up and hiked her shoulders back. Her hands were shaking again, but now she knew why.

Somewhere to her right, she heard a groan. Oh goody, someone she could ask some questions. With any luck, it would be Beatrice.

o-o-o

Raven had thought the ground was closer when he saw Rita, so there was a very painful, likely injurous jolt when it turned out he was wrong and his knee gave out painfully as he landed. Ba'ul trilled in concern, but continued to bank off all the same, looking for somewhere safe to land for a pick up. But Raven hadn't been able to wait. He'd seen her, the electricity crackling off of her in long, bright arcs that lit up the dark clouds around her. She was so little. He had forgotten just how tiny she was. So he'd thrown the ladder down the side of the Fierta and scrambled down so quickly his ears had popped yet again.

She was fine. Of course she was. The poor bastard she had by the collar was not though. Bleeding out of his ears and being shaken like a dog by the genius mage of Aspio, the man dn't look alive at first. Rita was talking to him - that was terrifying enough in and of itself, Rita talking instead of yelling at someone she was angry with - but he looked barely conscious enough to respond, held up only by the sheer, surprising force of Rita's arms. Rita didn't seem to care. She just shook him and talked to him and shook him again. The heat and energy hissing around her was palpable, making Raven's hair stand on end even from a hundred yards away.

Then, as Raven limped towards the edge of the crater that had blasted away the ground and whatever had stood on that ground, the mage twitched as if tapped on the shoulder. She whirled and met his gaze, as he stood up above her, still quite a ways off. The man she was threatening said something - stuttered, really, if his facial expressions meant anything - and then he tumbled to the ground as Rita's grip released abruptly. Her small, bony finger shot out and stabbed the air between the mage and the archer.

"You," he felt, more than heard her growl. The feeling, the acknowledgement, rippled over him like the field that had interfered with his heart, and Raven realized - as if the obliterated building had not already tipped him off - the vast amounts of power that one tiny woman-child controlled because some spirits fancied her.

Oh shit.

She was scrambling towards him now, and her tripping and stumbling or how she had to hike her skirts up to her knees to manage, exposing bony kneecaps and skin white as paper, none of that managed to dampen the dangerous aura rippling off her in waves.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she demanded as she climbed the shelves of rubble towards him. It was almost a relief to hear her yelling again. Raven's knee hurt and his chest ached and his shoulder still screamed at him and he realized that he couldn't get any closer to her. She would have to come to him. He sank to his knees - to reach her, not to rest his legs newly made of rubber - and grabbed her wrist as she reached up to him. She was so light that, despite his shoulder, one good heave had her up and into his arms. Well, where his arms were at least, and though she grabbed his elbow to pull herself up and he hooked his free arm behind her waist to keep her from falling backwards, he couldn't bring himself to touch her anymore. He wanted... no.

Then Rita punched him and the fizzing tension that was making his heart tick snapped. The spirits withdrew from her veins and off her skin and then she was just Rita again.

"The hell are you doing out here?" she demanded again. "Where is everyone? Did you just come with Ba'ul alone? Are you insane? How did you find me? I was doing fine without you. This is the stupidest thing you have ever done. Bar. None."

Each question or statement was punctuated by another jab or poke.

"Sorry, sorry, ow, sorry, was all he could mutter.

"And you are bleeding out of your heart! What the actual hell?"

No, of course she wouldn't miss that. And as she started to try and examine him right there, Raven didn't miss the haggard circles under her eyes, or the muddy streak down her front that smelled of vomit.

"R-Rita darlin'," he protested, trying to wave her hands away even as he submitted to her continued abuse. "Lemme explain."

But he couldn't. Because that was when his body decided it was too old for all this shit and he was falling.

o-o-o

There it was, that damn trust in his eyes again as he was falling and she threw her shoulder into the catch so that she avoided a clocked head but blew all the wind out of the them both.

"Sorry," he said again, so quietly it was hard to hear. "I'm s'pposed to be rescuin' ya."

"Bang up job you're doing of that," Rita scoffed. "Let's get out of here." She stooped to hook his arm over her shoulder. He was not as heavy as she remembered, but it was probably that she wasn't drunk this time and he was doing his damndest to keep himself upright even though that was making it harder to keep him in a straight line.

When he had pulled her out of the crater, his grip was tight on her wrist and for one brief, stupid, panicked instant - and she was sure there had never been those instants before she had friends - she wondered if he had been Raven or Schwann when he had kidnapped Estelle. If he had lured her in disguised as a friendly, semi-harmless halfwit, or if he had simply gone about his business and hauled her before Alexei, all cold efficiency.

The thought made her want to set something on fire. Where had that come from? She was confident she had never been this irrational before she had friends, before she had people to look out for, before there were people to look out for her. Before she had to trust people, life was easier. Because when you trusted people, they failed you, or worse, they stopped at nothing not to fail you. They drove themselves to the old man's condition, bleeding, barely conscious, his skin hot to the touch even through the fabric of his shirt.

People used your friends to get to you. Rita had the realization that they - whoever it was that Beatrice was working with - could have kidnapped her just to get to Raven. Well, that was stupid. The old man would have been easy enough to capture if anything with boobs had been bait. And Raven could take care of himself. And there was no way to know that he would be the one to come after her. And it wouldn't make any sense to use her, Rita, as a lure for the lech. Her boobs weren't big enough. And yet... She looked across the old man's shoulders where his head was lolling to one side and his stubble was caked with blood and dust.

And yet...

Abruptly nervous and wanting to throw up yet again, Rita shifted the old man's weight.

"Gnome, I need to ask another favor," she muttered under her breath.

"Wassat?" Raven asked, not hearing, but she ignored him. Behind them, a loud crack and rumbling as Gnome dragged up four smooth, solid slabs of rock and scooped them together into a prison box. He would find all the people here and put them in that box. Beatrice, or whoever, would have some explaining to do. The idiot she'd found by her hole had been no help at all, just rambling about how it hadn't been his idea. Whatever. One thing at a time.

"C'mon, old man," Rita said, dragging him away from the crater. She hadn't asked, but Gnome had also slammed a fair section of dirt into a hard packed surface that Ba'ul was already touching the Fierta to. The Entelexia was singing anxiously, his big voice sending pebbles skittering along the ground with the reverberation, and Rita could feel her insides rattling.

"Can it, you fuzzball," she growled at him, but he knew she didn't mean it. She was so tired all of a sudden. Raven jerked as if waking from a nightmare and she almost dropped him.

"Rita?" he asked, his voice heavy and slurred.

"I'm right here," she said. "It's okay."

"'m here to save ya."

She snorted with what felt like her last bit of strength.

"Thanks, old man."


	10. Chapter 10

Whatever the old man and Ba'ul had been up to, they'd done it in a hurry. Not only had Judy stayed behind, Tokunaga had finally made an appearance, fretting about the ship and demanding to know why he hadn't been on board. Yuri was actually surprised himself. The ship mate practically lived on the ship even when it wasn't in the air, keeping the ropes in order, scrubbing the railings and in general obsessing about it like it was a new baby. Clearly, he'd been out and about enjoying the celebrations when the explosions had struck and whatever fool plan the old man had went into action.

"Relax, Tokunaga," Judy called to him from her spot on the stretcher. "The ship will be fine on its own for a little while, I'm sure."

Noticing that she wasn't on board either, and what's more she was injured, Tokunaga's anxiety levels only went up, even if his volume went down.

"What you doing, there, pretty miss?" he asked in concern, and he went to go sit by her, the two of them talking in hushed tones as she explained the situation. The three of them - Ba'ul, Judith and Tokunaga - had formed a camaraderie of the air together, despite Tokunaga really not having much to do beyond the occasional steering for a water landing. The Fierta had been his home for far longer than it had belonged to Brave Vesperia and he was a part of it. His worry for the ship was as real as his worry for any of the other members of their little band and Judy was probably the only one who could talk any kind of reassurance into him. It was her home too now.

The addition of the shipman was making for tight quarters in the little tent of sorts that was being erected. Estelle had simply stopped in the middle of the street when she had began to help people, but apparently that spot had been good enough for the rest of the relief effort and a small temporary hospital was growing as if by magic around her. This particular corner had the princess kneeling over yet another patient - this one with a broken sternum and a particularly nasty bloody cough for it - and two nurses - one an actual nurse, the other a midwife who had set her fair share of broken bones. Yuri was beside the princess, his sword taking up more room than it technically needed to as he held it against the bottom of his crossed arms, but creating a welcome bit of breathing room in the crush. Judith was settled against the wall - really just a bit of sheet someone had hung up to add a little privacy and shade - with her leg propped up. She had the advantage of being down below waist-height, where there weren't so many things being carried or jostled.

It was crowded, with plenty of feet being stepped on and plenty of elbows threatening to knock equipment over. It was dangerous to be out here, Yuri thought again anxiously. One 'mistaken' slip of a hand, one 'oops, I'm sorry, didn't see you there' and Estelle could be gone, no matter how she kept insisting that she wasn't a target and the fact that Flynn kept popping his head in every four seconds. So Yuri refused to leave her, no matter how many times she pleaded with him to make himself useful elsewhere. Karol was around somewhere, helping to put up more of the shade hangings. His hammer was being used as a side support for a stretcher, though perhaps that wasn't the best idea, because the team who had hauled it in laden with its patient had complained that the hammer was heavier than the person.

Estelle was waning. He could see it in how her face was growing pale and her fingers trembled a little when she extended them. He was going to have to force her to rest in a little while. Chewing on gels was not going to fix the problem long term, and he could see her reaching for her pocket repeatedly, trying to keep her strength up.

o-o-o

Rita hadn't meant to fall asleep. She didn't think it would be possible, what with the adrenaline still turning her knees into mush and her heart thumping in her ears. But apparently she had, slumped on deck against the wall of the cabin just after managing to get the old man up the ladder. Raven himself was sprawled out on the deck, wrapped up in what looked to have been a Schwann Brigade uniform, clogged with blood and dirt drying in flake and chunks across the fabric.

"Shit shit shit," was all she could get out as she crawled over and slapped at his face. "Hey, hey old man. Shit shit shit shit. Hey."

"Mmmph," came the single glorious noise from the old man himself, his head lolling to one side and his eyelids fluttering.

"Hey, you are not dying on me, do you hear me?"

"Uhhh, an-anythin' for ya, Rita darlin'..." The words came out as a barely audible mutter, his lips - which were chapped even though he was drooling a little - hardly moving. But then he groaned and rolled into a sitting position, clutching at his chest and then at his leg.

"Oh, Rita m'dear, everything's a little throbby right now."

"Quit whining," Rita said, standing up and hiking her dress up onto her chest again. "Where the hell are we?"

o-o-o

"Oh hell no," Raven heard Rita mutter as she leaned over the railing, clutching her clothing. He'd noticed it sliding down while she stood in the hole she had made, the lack of straps not making it any easier. The span of her back was streaked with dirt. He looked away quickly, closing his eyes and leaning back. They'd gotten further than he thought. It sounded like they were outside the capitol.

"The hell is all this?" Rita went on viciously. "What the hell were you people doing while I was gone?"

Then her arms were hooked under his again and she was dragging him up. Her wrists were like wire cutting into his ribs and he forced himself up more to make it stop than because of any real energy to do so.

"Come on," Rita grunted as he leaned heavily on her. "Let's get you patched up. Ba'ul, you tell Judy we need Estelle as soon as you can find a place to land."

Why she thought they needed to go down below - which meant stairs - and why he had to be sitting on a stool, not to mention _how _she'd gotten him down said stairs and up onto said stool, Raven didn't know. But she was tapping on the plates and had her ear to his back and then she dragged the glowing control out and was sitting across from him on a stool of her own, typing, hemming and hawing as if she were back in her own lab, with the lights all aglow and her screwdrivers in their neat chaotic pile, rather than several hundred feet up in the air, half-naked, covered in muddy sick and Raven's blood.

Raven just closed his eyes.

"Shirt off, old man," Rita huffed, and he didn't move as she unbuttoned what was left of his buttons. There was a hesitation as she realized that she'd have to get the sleeves off his injured shoulder, but he could practically _hear _her shrug as she retrieved a knife from the galley block and cut the fabric away. Raven didn't remember what shirt he had pulled on that morning, what seemed like weeks ago now. He hoped it wasn't one of his favorites, with all their moth holes and worn cuffs.

"Okay, arm up," she declared, sitting across from him again.

o-o-o

Raven actually cried out in pain - a little stilted thing - as Rita lifted his wounded arm.

She paused, unable to recall him ever having done that before. Sure, he whined all the time when she smacked him or if he was tired, but an actual involuntary noise?

Suddenly she wasn't so sure she could do this.

"I gotta take a look at this blastia right now," she said, not really sure if he could hear her. Her voice was suddenly cracking and sticking in her throat, and his eyes were squeezed shut. He didn't respond, but he bit his lip as she scooted her stool forward and hoisted his elbow onto her own shoulder, letting it rest there. She could see him trembling, all the muscles of his shoulder and chest twitching.

"Hey," she said, unsure. He was worse than she'd thought.

"'s that all right with ya?" Raven asked, as if she hadn't been the one to put the damn thing on her shoulder.

"Yes, idiot," she vented at him.

He relaxed - the idiot had been trying to hold it up himself!? - and the muscles around the blastia stopped twitching so much in effort. Seriously, how could one arm be so _heavy_?

"Need to start working out more, huh, you old fart?" she asked, trying to distract herself as she swiped open another panel and peered at the scrolling figures of the read out, the display barely fitting between them.

"Apparently so, m'dear."

She was impressed that he could get that much out. Rita actually spared a glace to look up at his face - whoa, when did his face get so close to the top of her head? - and frowned. He looked ashen, his eyes still squeezed shut, and his breathing labored.

"H-hey, you gonna be okay?" She was going to get him to Estelle. She was, but this had to happen now.

"H-huh?" He blinked blearily and then closed his eyes again, breaths coming sharp and shallow. "Never better."

"Stay with me now," she hissed, tapping through the screens. The pump timings were off, causing an arrhythmia. If she could get them back in sync, she could get the blood flowing correctly again. If she was lucky, that and a little mending of the flesh around it and that would be it. If not...

Raven sucked in a long, labored breath and his free arm raised slowly to rest on the back of Rita's stool, near her hip, trying to keep his weight up. And suddenly his chest was very, very close to her face as he leaned forward, head hanging low.

"Old man?"

"Rita, I-" His arm was heavy on her shoulder and the other was hot against her waist. "I don't feel so..."

And then he fell, his head slumping neatly onto her shoulder and all of his weight falling onto her hands as she brought them up between them. For one brief moment, she held him there, her face full of his hair, stool tottering. Then she lost her balance and fell backwards.

She only narrowly avoided smashing her brains out on the wooden floor, she was positive. As it was, her vision went white and blue for a moment and she couldn't breathe as every whistle in the world screamed through her ears. She was amazed that she didn't pass out, but she was going to have to check with Estelle that she didn't have a concussion later.

She did not have the time for this.

Raven was heavy. Very heavy. Muscle was heavier than fat, and apparently he had a lot more muscle than she had thought. His chest rested on her stomach, his blastia poking a painful dent above her naval. She coughed, scarcely able to draw in breathe past his bulk.

"Hey..."

Her left leg was trapped under both of his as he sprawled awkwardly across her, her right tangled in the snarl of stool legs.

"H-hey, old..."

Her arms were under his chest, her own elbow jabbing into her ribs.

"Old man!"

"Mmmph."

She froze.

His face was pressed into the side of her neck, just where it met her shoulder, and as he breathed out the noise, the vibrations hummed through his lips against her skin and his hot breath whooshed into the back of her hair.

This was not okay. This was so very not okay.

"Raven!"

His left arm, the one that had been propped on her shoulder, was up by her ear. So was his right arm, maybe having been trying to break the fall, but now her head was boxed in, trapped. Her left ankle throbbed where it was twisted and flattened under his calves.

"Mmph," he said again, and the buzzing at her neck set all her hair on end.

"Raven, if you don't get off me, I'll-"

He said something, or tried to, and she shrank violently away from the feeling of his lips moving against her skin, still gritty from the dirt. He smelled like leather and cotton and sweat and fear and blood, and the smell was suffocating her as she tried to suck in air beneath his weight.

"O-old man-"

She was not going to start hyperventilating. She was _not_.

Then his arms moved, coming together, nearly embracing her head, then slid down her shoulders. Rita closed her eyes and forced herself not to start chanting. She was fine. They were fine. Raven was just unconscious, or barely conscious. Let him rest a minute. He'd get up.

She felt the muscles of his chest flex against her hands, then he tried to brace himself on his arms. For one glorious second, she could suck in an lungful of air as he lifted his weight off her stomach. Then it all blew out again in a pained cry as he fell onto her again, his injured shoulder unable to take the burden.

"Jus... jus' gimme a sec..." His mouth wasn't at her neck anymore, but now it was a few inches up at her ear, which wasn't any better. His shoulders covered hers and his arms were sprawled out to the sides where they had slipped.

Knowing that he was conscious instantly made things much better and much worse. Better because that meant he wasn't dead. Worse because it meant he kept moving, trying to get up. His hip stabbed her in the thigh as he tried to roll to one side, and his shoulder shifted so that it was now _her _face against _his _neck. He had a thick sheen of sweat that smeared on her cheek and his skin smelled like it was just shy of sunburn as it burned against hers.

Finally he lay completely still, his blastia hiccupping between their chests. The panel was still out, she could see the orange glow from where it was trying to maintain itself somewhere in the floor.

"'m sorry, Rita darlin'," he said, nearly whispering. "I just can't get up. Too... too weak."

"Figured it out. Just stay put," Rita ground out, even though every muscle in her body was screaming to get him off of her. His breath was combing through her matted hair. It was hot. His entire body was hot.

Rita realized she was trembling.

"'m sorry," he whispered again, and she knew he could feel it.

"Shut up," she hissed, fighting back tears and the urge to cast.

That was when there was a hearty thump through the entire ship that caused her lungs to rattle and the stools to shift on her legs. They'd landed. Now they just needed to be rescued.

o-o-o

Judy's head snapped around and Yuri knew that Ba'ul at least was back.

"They're on the outskirts of the city. Ba'ul can't find a place to land any closer."

Shit, now they'd have to get there before the rest of the city.

Estelle was struggling to remain focused on the patient while overhearing the news. "Oh, Judy, are they okay?" She poured another pulse of light into the man's chest, the horrendous bruise fading and shrinking into itself a little.

Yuri didn't wait to hear the answer. There had been a 'they' involved, which meant at least someone was on board. Wrapping his scabbard strap another hitch around his palm, he scooped at Estelle's elbow and pulled her into a standing position.

"You ready to go?"

"Yuri, I can't just..."

"He's fine," he said, gesturing at the man who clearly was going to make it, if going to need a bit of bed rest. The nurses were no longer gathered around like worried mother hens, but instead were patting him reassuringly on the shoulder and moving along to the next patient, this one with a broken leg that would heal just fine with conventional methods.

"Yuri..."

"Look, they're probably going to need you on the boat."

Estelle still hesitated, looking back at Judith, who still hadn't moved. She was looking after them, an odd twist to her mouth that wasn't entirely due to the pain in her elevated leg.

"They're going to need you," she confirmed quietly, relaying whatever Ba'ul was telling her.

"Flynn's not going to let me leave," Estelle protested, but her voice was low as she glanced around the tent. Flynn was around a corner somewhere and for this brief moment, there were no other soldiers in sight, all of them having been quickly conscripted for various tasks.

"By the time Flynn can get out there, we don't know what's going to have happened."

Estelle looked over at Judy, not protesting as Yuri cupped her elbow.

"Did he find her?" Estelle breathed. Yuri himself paused just long enough to catch Judith's nod. Then they were out the door, Judith calling out directions behind them.

"Just before the river!"

And they were gone.

o-o-o

Rita forced herself to take yet another calming breath. What was this, the seven hundredth? What the hell was taking them so long?

Raven was drifting in and out of consciousness. She could tell because every so often his limbs would jerk and he would make a small noise that rattled through her chest. Her arms were still between them and she had managed to shove him just far enough off her that she could manage to take yet another breath to keep herself from panicking, but that was about it. He would move and mutter and clearly be on the verge of trying to get himself to his feet, but then he would go limp and she would panic again for a second before she felt the reassuring hum of his heart. Or as reassuring a hum as its little hiccups could be. She needed to get it fixed.

It took an unknown number of breaths, calming or otherwise, for Ba'ul to give a low shuddering moan that rattled through the beams of the ship and Rita heard a faint, familiar voice calling out in a slightly-less-than-its-usual-cool volume.

"Rita! Raven?" Yuri's sword could be heard clacking on the wooden steps of the rope ladder as he climbed up the side of the ship.

"In the galley!" Rita shouted as best she could. Raven started violently, his shoulders shifting and his boot toe dug into her shin viciously.

The thundering of multiple boots came down the stairs and Rita heard a very distinctly-Estelle gasp.

"Rita!" came the princess's voice, with Yuri's "What the hell is going on here?" simultaneously.

And then the weight was off her chest and the old man made another tiny noise deep in his throat as he was dragged up by his arms and Rita's stomach dropped, hot and shallow, into a pit.

"Rita, are you okay?" Estelle asked, but she was over Raven, both her hands on his chest and her face all aglow with gold.

"Uh-huh," was all Rita could get out, still on her back, her head turned to see where Raven was crumpled next to her. Yuri appeared above her, his hair falling down to tickle at her forehead. She put a hand up to readjust her dress again and closed her eyes.

"I need to fix his chest," she said, not sure if anyone could hear her.

"I've got it, Rita," Estelle said, her voice high, but firm.

"No, no, the pipes are out of alignment," Rita said, and she grabbed at the air until Yuri grasped her hand.

"Rita, you need to rest," he said.

"No time," but she couldn't get those words out audibly and instead just a whoosh of air came out mostly and she hauled on Yuri's hand until he firmed up his grip and pulled her into a sitting position.

"Heeeey, genius mage," Raven slurred, but his eyes were half-open and there was some color to his face again. Another whoosh of healing and he didn't look nearly as hung-over.

"Shut up," she said, pulling up the panel. Sync up the valves and she could sleep. Sync up the valves and she could sleep.

Yuri said something to her, but she didn't hear it. Just needed to adjust the timing. It was funny how something like reprogramming the entire damn thing to work with mana took like thirty seconds on the top of a tower, when this, something as simple as changing some timers and running a clean cycle was taking a damn year.

It was a slipshod job. She knew it, but she couldn't muster up the strength to do anymore. Her eyes were hot and her spine just didn't want to support her anymore. But she was going to be damned if she was going to collapse on his chest a second time in her life, so she was careful to lean back on her heels and sit heavily as she clapped the control panels back into invisibility.

"When you're done with the old man, Estelle," she remembered to say, "if you could take a look at my head."

o-o-o

Raven woke up on the floor, securely tucked in with a blanket that smelled foul. To be fair, it was him making it smell foul, but he couldn't help coughing as the smell stung the back of his throat.

Yuri looked over from where he was standing across the room, the swordsman's arms tense under his sleeves.

"Sorry about the floor, old man," he said. "We just couldn't get you up in the bunks."

"Not a problem. Floors are nice," was what Raven heard himself say as he pushed the blanket down somewhere away from his face. His bare torso was cold, but damn he reeked. He fought the urge to cover his blastia with one hand. It's not like Yuri didn't already know it was there. "Is she okay?"

Rita was in one of the bunks, flat on her back and also neatly tucked in. She was still white as a sheet, but at least she wasn't green-looking anymore.

"She'll be okay, Estelle said. Took a few knocks to the head, but nothing serious. You were in far worse shape."

"And she's the one that got kidnapped," Raven finished wryly, knowing it was where Yuri would have taken it eventually.

"The hell is wrong with you, old man?" Yuri's voice was quiet, disappointed. It was odd. "What did you think you were doing?"

Ah, so that was it.

"I can't say as I was thinkin'," Raven admitted, rubbing at his forehead with his knuckles before rolling over gingerly and pushing himself into a sitting position.

"You almost got yourself killed. You could have gotten Rita killed. What if you had needed backup?"

"Psh, Rita had things well in hand by the time I got there," Raven said, crossing his legs and hunching over around his heart as if that might help the jittery ticks he could feel interrupting the normally-steady flow. Whatever he'd done to it, it had been bad.

"What happened?" Yuri continued. It was as if he couldn't decide what question he wanted answered first, and so he was just asking all of them, hoping he would get some information just in the asking.

Raven sighed.

"I dunno, kid," he said, rubbing at his forehead again. "I just... couldn't sit around and wait for something else to happen. You woulda done the same thing."

"Didn't get a chance," Yuri muttered. He looked uncomfortable. "You..."

There was a moment of silence. Raven looked up, gauging the younger man's expression. Very un-Yuri-like, with hints of embarrassment and anger.

"I know, I know, I was an idiot," Raven said, trying to reassure the swordsman, trying to get that look off his face.

"You and the genius mage..." Yuri started again.

It was of course when Rita's glorious sense of ill-timing came into effect again and she groaned and coughed and Yuri turned to look at her.

"Hey," he said, and Rita opened her eyes. Raven watched her stare at the bunk above her head, blink slowly, and then continue to stare.

"You okay? How're you feeling?" Yuri asked, but Rita just continued to stare blankly. Raven's mouth went dry, watching her working out just where she was and who was talking to her. The tenseness in her jaw, the way her shoulders began to draw up towards her chin, he could see the cogs in her head clicking through the evidence.

"Rita," he heard himself say. The mage blinked and her head turned slowly to the side to meet his gaze, the lines of her neck slowly relaxing. Raven saw Yuri look between the two of them and he realized what it was that Yuri had been going to say.

Oh.

Shit.

"How's your heart, old man?" was the first thing Rita said.

"Better. Seems I have you to thank for that again."

She snorted. "I need to look at it again soon. I can't help it if you're an idiot, but I can patch up the shit job I did. "

"Later."

"Later," she confirmed. Her eyes closed again.

"Yuri!" Estelle came down the stairs then, her boot heels clicking on the wood and echoing through the room in the sudden silence. "Yuri, there are soldiers here for Rita and Raven."

"What?"

The noise of the city could be heard through the hull, but it was a faint hum, a bustle of activity and voices. Now that Raven was paying attention, he could hear the rattle of the ladder against the side of the ship and he wrapped the blanket around himself again, covering the plate. Yuri stood at attention, rapping his sword hilt against his leg as if it were an enemy coming down the stairs. Estelle reached him and put a hand on his chest briefly before moving to Rita's side.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"Yeah, I'll survive."

Raven sighed and stood up, now mostly ignored by all parties for a brief moment as Yuri intercepted the soldiers and the girls were occupied with reassuring each other. Couldn't they just wait until he'd had a wash? His legs were weak, and he could feel his back muscles trembling with the effort to keep himself upright. He needed a chair, pretty quickly. Standing up had been a bad idea.

"Hey, old man," Yuri called from the door. "Someone here to see you."

"What can I say? I've got a lot of friends." It was all he could think to say, the only persona he could fall back on for a moment. A stool wasn't as good as a chair, but it was going to have to do for now.

The officer that arrived first looked suspicious. Not that he himself looked shifty, but that he looked at every single occupant of the room as if they were shifty. Even the princess, who was sitting as prim and proper as every second of her life had told her to until some long-haired, girly-faced ruffian had come along and ruined everything. Yuri noticed and shifted his weight eloquently.

"Raven," the officer said, putting a question at the end of the name, as if he wasn't sure which of the national heroes was the commonly disregarded scruffy one. Or maybe he couldn't make saying a single name sound authoritative without the last name to back it up.

"Present and accounted for," Raven said, waving carefully from beneath the blanket. The officer's eyebrow tweaked ever so slightly, daring him to get snippy, but Raven didn't even bother trying to meet the other man's gaze. He was not going to even try playing this game right now. He just tried to catch Rita's eye, which was hard because her eyes were still closed.

Well, this was going to be fun.

o-o-o

The ship effectively became a prison within thirty seconds of the soldiers' arrival. Yuri found this out when Estelle finally dragged herself away from Rita's side and went out onto the deck to see about getting back to the people on the ground. Yuri, of course, was right behind her. The captain down in the hold hadn't stopped them, but clearly there were orders to keep them on the ship.

"We're sorry, your highness," a soldier at the top of the rope ladder said, putting a hand out but clearly hesitant to actually physically restrain the princess, "but we can't let you leave until the commandant arrives."

"You know who this is, right?" Yuri said, piping up where Estelle just sort of stared, half accepting orders out of habit, half determined to go and help as much as she could. "You really want to get in her way?"

"I'm sorry, your highness," the soldier said, eyeing Yuri warily but not moving from his post. "It's for your own safety."

"Why can't people believe me when I said I'll be fine! I'm not who they're after!" Estelle was the closest Yuri had seen to either stamping her foot or slugging the soldier right in the nose. He decided to present himself as a better target, since the poor jackass at the ladder was just doing his job.

"You keep telling yourself that, princess," Yuri said, gently pulling her to a tidy pile of rope and netting and setting her down on it. She of course sat like she was on a throne, back straight and hands folded in her lap, even as her face was almost as pink as her hair with anger.

"If anything, I'm in more danger here, since they're after Rita." She was wringing her hands until the knuckles turned white, both of her gloves long gone now. Yuri absently reached out and pulled at her right thumb until she untwisted her hands. She was going to give herself arthritis or something doing that.

"I think Ba'ul could more than see anyone coming and take off before they get anywhere close. Really just got a keep an eye on this guards. Anyone can put on a uniform. We'll just wait for Flynn to get here."

He didn't realize he had held onto her thumb, let alone was running the pad of his own thumb along her knuckle until he realized that she wasn't breathing. Weird that he would notice that before noticing he was touching her. The realization made him jerk his hand away and glance at her face to judge her reaction, but she was looking down at her hand, face a bright, blotchy red and eyes wide. She let her breath out in a long, slow sigh and Yuri flinched.

"Hey, 'm sorry," he heard himself mumbling. Estelle just continued to stare at her hand.

"Estelle?"

She finally looked up at him, then quickly back down.

"It-it's okay. I'm sorry, I just realized..."

"No, no I'm sorry. It wasn't okay for me to touch you."

"No!" And then she had his hand in both of her and it literally took every ounce of self control he had not to run his thumb down the inside of her right palm.

"No, no I just realized that we've never held hands before today. We touch each other all the time, silly." And she was looking at him and blushing, her face still a patchwork of different colors, ranging from pale pink to bright red. It was amazing how perfect that cacophony of colors was, even as it clashed with her hair.

Then she looked down at their hands again and she pulled her hands away as if he'd burned her.

"I'm sorry. This isn't important right now."

"Don't be sorry." He wasn't sure if he should take her hands again. He wanted to. This _was_ important. But the guard was watching them now and clearly some shit was going to go down with the explosions and Rita's disappearance and Raven's bullshit plan - or lack thereof - and suddenly Yuri realized that he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life anymore or what was going to happen in even the next twenty four hours.

"Estelle-" he started but then cut himself off.

Fortunately, he was saved from saying anything else of import by the arrival of Flynn, announced by a couple of heavy thumps on the bow of the ship and a throaty welcoming bellow from Ba'ul where he still hovered above their heads. Yuri saw the bright platinum blond of the commandant's head before it breached the railing. He reached out for Estelle, but kept it safe, just touched her shoulder. There was no way in hell he was cutting her out, no matter what anyone said.

"Hey, don't worry about it, okay? You want to hold my hand, you hold my hand."

If anything, her blush got brighter. He could practically feel it burning him from across the way.

"C'mon, let's see what Flynn has to complain about now."

She smiled, which was what she was supposed to do. He smiled back and did not kiss her silly, which was what he was supposed to do.

"Yuri," Flynn said immediately upon boarding. It was not a greeting. It was barely an acknowledgement. Instead, it came out as an accusation. Yuri tried not to bristle. It was difficult.

"Hey, Flynn."

The commandant was immediately in front of him, barely looking at the princess, a sharp reversal from their encounter down in the square.

"Yuri, what the hell were you thinking?"

"I was thinking I could help out a little. You looked busy."

"Do you know how much danger you put the princess in? Do you know how much manpower was distracted in looking for you? Do you ever even think about what you do?"

"Flynn, I wanted to come," Estelle began, but Flynn raised a hand.

"I'm sorry, pardon me, your highness, but don't try to defend him this time. You wouldn't have come here if it weren't for him."

"How do you know that?" Estelle exclaimed. "Rita and Raven are my friends too!"

"Be that as it may, Rita and Raven have not been accounted for, their disappearance has not been explained, and there is a large of information I simply do not have, your highness. Their friendship to either you or me is not worth a jot right now in light of very serious events that have yet to be explained." It was the closest Yuri had ever seen Flynn to snapping at someone other than Yuri himself, and he was doing it to the princess.

"Flynn..." he tried.

"It's Commandant Scifo," Flynn barked, snapping back to Yuri. "Now, where are Raven and Rita Mordio?"

o-o-o

Raven was surprised that they hadn't already arrested him. Flynn had slammed into the cabin, taken one look at Raven, then whirled back to Yuri and Estelle who were hot on his heels, looking bitter and contrite respectively.

"You," the fresh-faced commandant said to Yuri in a tone that sent shivers down Raven's spine for reasons he didn't want to think about. "You are to wait here with Captain Marlow."

Captain Marlow was apparently not thrilled with the idea of babysitting the dangerous criminals, as his lips tightened and he eyed Yuri even more suspiciously as the swordsman just turned on his heel without a word and walked over to lean on the wall by where Raven was sitting.

"Princess, would you please accompany me back to the aid station?"

"But..."

"I'm afraid I will not allow you to refuse, your highness."

Estelle's eyes narrowed at the command. It cheered Raven's spirits a little. Give her a bit more time on her own and if she got ahold of the throne, the empire wasn't going to know what hit it. But she also was diplomatic enough to know this was a fight not worth fighting.

"What about Rita?" was all she said.

"Miss Mordio will be coming with us as soon as a stretcher can be found."

"Don't bother," came Rita's voice from her bunk. "I'll hike myself over there, thanks."

"Miss Mordio-" Flynn began, but Rita had none of Estelle's tact and she waved him off, talking right over him before he could finish his protest.

"Let me walk or clap me in irons, Flynn, your choice." She punctuated the sentence with rolling out of the bunk and landing on her feet.

Any worries Raven might have had about her vanished as she glared down the blond commandant. Actually, that wasn't true at all, but the fact that she was there, wobbling a little but standing her ground, fists balled up at her sides, made whatever they were going to do to him worth it. He tried to keep from laughing as Rita unhurriedly adjusted her dress again as it began to slip down and Flynn's face took on the slightest tinge of pink even if his expression didn't change.

Flynn and Estelle were cut from the same cloth and he yielded as gracefully as one could under the circumstances.

"Very well. After you."

And they were gone.

Rita didn't look back.

For some reason that made Raven's heart hurt and he pulled the blanket tighter around himself.

o-o-o

"Well, at least the mage is safe. Good thinking on your part, Raven," the officer said abruptly, in a tone that he obviously thought was friendly and conversational, turning to where the archer slouched wearily on his stool. Yuri watched Raven's eyelids lower and raise in one slow blink.

"Huh?" It was like he was coming out of a daze, his shoulders picking themselves up from where they had been hunched almost to his chin. The officer didn't seem to notice, his helmet tucked smartly under one arm, the very picture of military efficiency. Yuri wanted to knock a few teeth out of his smug grin.

"Due to your quick thinking," the uniformed moron continued, "we have retained a valuable asset to our cause."

"You know she should be on bed rest, right? I mean, she's not exactly up for a jaunt through the front lines. She's not a weapon, she's a scientist." If Yuri hadn't known Raven, he would have thought the man was being flippant. He'd leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and tilting his head to one side. But Yuri saw a flash of something, something he didn't understand and didn't want to understand. Something he feared in himself sometimes, right before he fell asleep at night. Still, the officer continued.

"To be sure, but we still don't know the circumstances around her disappearance. There is a very real chance she orchestrated this herself."

Yuri recognized the next flash then, a flicker of the serene fury that had been Schwann. His hand clenched on his scabbard without him realizing it.

"What are you talking about? Rita wouldn't betray us," Yuri spoke up before Raven could... do whatever thought had accompanied that flicker.

"I have no doubt of that," the captain replied, making it clear that he did very much doubt it and why was Yuri talking to him anyway? "But there are ways to control people, persuade them, force them to act in ways they might not otherwise."

Raven shifted a little and Yuri swore mentally. Great, instead of steering the conversation safely away, it was getting even closer to the subject of Schwann. How did Estelle manage this deflecting thing?

"Well, that's not going to happen," he said finally. He turned to Raven, who was staring into a space somewhere beyond the captain.

He wouldn't have thought he would actually want Flynn to come back, with the mood the commandant had been in. But something about the look on Raven's face made Yuri realize he needed to keep the conversation away from Rita unless it was absolutely necessary, and Flynn at least wasn't a complete asshat.

And then he and the old man needed to have a conversation. Soon.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Writing this chapter included prime examples of "killing your darlings" for me. There were some lovely scenes planned and even written for this chapter (some before the story was even kicked off properly, all that time ago) that just did not make the cut. They might make it into future chapters in some manner or another, but it hurt so badly when I realized that they were simply not going to fit into what was happening anymore. _


	11. Chapter 11

Rita barely remembered the rest of the day. There was a cot, then there were guards, Estelle was gone, and then finally Flynn just locked her in the dungeon. She did specifically remember that the locking up came after Estelle had been carefully lured away with the promise of more responsibility elsewhere.

"I'm sorry, Miss Mordio," Flynn apologized as she settled in behind bars, and she knew he was covering his ass, not really sorry. "You'll be safest in here."

Rita knew he meant that the world would be safest from her, but she didn't feel like proving his point by setting him on fire. She was too tired. Besides, she had no idea what the hell was going on. Someone said something about her lab being trashed, and she'd seen the crowds and the smoke from up with Ba'ul, but no one seemed particularly interested in explaining anything to her. But she was too tired to say much of anything to anyone, and so she fell asleep, still covered in dirt, vomit and blood, on a sour-smelling cot.

When she woke up however long later, however, she was beyond furious.

"Hey!" she screamed, kicking at the door until a guard showed up on the other side of the bars. Sore toes were worth it for the panicked whites in his eyes as he came around the corner. "What's the big idea?"

The guard looked flabbergasted, like no one would ever protest being locked in a cell. "The commandant explained it to you, Miss Mordio. This is for your own protection."

"Bullshit! No one's even come down to ask if I'm doing okay. I didn't even get a bath."

The guard remembered he was supposed to be in charge and had a script for this conversation.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, there's simply been no time or manpower to be spared. There are a lot of injured and the investigation-"

"I don't give a rat's ass about your investigation. If that really mattered, there would have been someone down here to talk to me."

o-o-o

Raven was tired of people talking to him.

First, there had been Captain Marlow and his droning that clearly proved he had no real idea of what was going on. Nobody really knew what was going on, not even Raven himself, but he answered the questions as they were put to him.

No, he didn't know who had taken the mage, but there had been mentions of this guy Olimar.

No, he didn't know where or even really who Olimar was.

Yes, he'd been acting entirely on his own when he'd gone to get Rita.

No, the Schwann brigade had nothing to do with this.

No, Brave Vesperia had nothing to do with this.

No, he had not been working with any other guilds.

No, he didn't think Rita was responsible for the destruction in the castle.

Raven asked about the doctor - Balfour - but there were no answers for him. He didn't bother trying to ask if anyone had held onto the man or if he was even still alive in the wake of the confusion of the explosions. Probably not. At the very least, the captain didn't seem interested in that information. Raven would wait and ask Flynn about it.

Yuri was also grilled, but he was considerably less willing to simply answer the questions.

"What the hell do you mean Rita's involvement with the princess is 'suspicious'? Rita's trying to fix your damn city!"

"I'm not in charge of Brave Vesperia, dammit. You're going to have to talk to Cap'n Karol about any of that."

"You seem fairly comfortable with not being out there to help out with the efforts."

All in all, it was an uncomfortable period of time that stretched far too long before Flynn finally came back. The captain seemed as relieved as Raven felt to see the commandant.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Flynn said to Marlow as he entered. Yuri muttered something in response, but it wasn't acknowledged by anyone in the room. Raven could tell that was rankling the swordsman more than anything else - being ignored. As much as he claimed he didn't like being the center of attention, Yuri was used to being listened to. He'd grow out of it and realize that there was value in being invisible, but Raven could see how much the boy's pride was hurt just by the fact that all the action had gone down without him. Yuri didn't realize how much he was used to being the center of attention, to being needed.

Raven had figured the kid out almost from the beginning. It wasn't that Yuri was boasting about how badass he was or was shooting for management, or even really wanted that attention, but he was used to it and not having something to do threw him for a loop. He didn't know what to do with himself when he was utterly left out of the goings on at hand, resentment for his curse be damned and never mind how Flynn would get all the credit anyway.

Raven, on the other hand, had been trying to stay out of the limelight for pretty much his entire life. And he'd been pretty successful at it thus far, at least for the common folk. Even most of anyone who had ever thought him important in any sense had no idea who he was on other fronts. The Don, for instance, had known Raven was more than he seemed, but that Raven was actually working for Alexei would have escaped the old man. The commandant though...

The new commandant looked tired. The grilling began anew. Raven told the whole story again and again, clarifying points and indulging their nitpicky details, only leaving out the trigger of the whole thing being the plate in his chest. Yuri caught all the talking around it - Raven caught him making faces of realization occasionally that the archer hoped the other two didn't see.

Finally, they seemed to have heard enough. Flynn ran a weary hand down his face and straightened his uniform.

"Raven, I am sure you realize that your decisions were poorly made."

"Yessir," was all he had to say to that in response.

"I am sympathetic to your feelings and your history, but Brave Vesperia and its members need to learn that they cannot simply do as they please, especially when it comes to national security."

Yuri snorted, but Flynn decided to ignore him.

"Yessir," Raven repeated.

Flynn looked like a little boy then, with too much responsibility heaped on him too soon, and Raven wanted to pat him on the shoulder and welcome him to the world, but the kid had to figure things out for himself and learn that not everyone could be friends all the time.

"Raven, I am placing you under house arrest in the Brave Vesperia guild headquarters until further notice as we further investigate these events."

"Yessir."

Well, that was generous of him. Even Yuri looked surprised. Raven had spent enough time in prison cells in his life to know that they weren't all that bad if you got the right jail, but house arrest was practically letting him go.

Captain Marlow didn't seem pleased with this turn of events.

"But sir-"

Flynn ignored him.

"Yuri," the commandant said, turning to the swordsman at last, "you really do seem not to be involved here, but you are to remain in the capitol. If I hear of you leaving without my express permission, I will throw you in the dungeon without hesitation, is that understood?"

Jail clearly didn't bother Yuri either, but he nodded.

"Sure, whatever."

Raven sighed and dug at his ear with a pinky.

"So when do I get to go be locked up?"

o-o-o

"I am demanding that you let me out at once," Rita said, as calmly as she could manage without breaking her teeth from the force of clenching them. The guard had long ago decided she couldn't be reasoned with and so was somewhere doing something other than letting her out.

The frustrating part was that she knew she could get herself out, but she couldn't in good conscience destroy the castle anymore than it was. So even though her hands were glowing, she refrained from launching anything anywhere. She'd seen rubble and she'd smelled smoke and there had been estimates of how much had been destroyed, but no one had told her yet where exactly the explosions had taken place. She had a nasty suspicion that her lab had been the target and that's why no one was saying anything. If it was, she was going to have to go back to her house in Capua Torim for whatever notes hadn't already been brought over. There weren't many of them. If her house hadn't been blown up too. That thought hurt more than it should have and so she filed it away somewhere she didn't have to think about it too hard. First thing was to get out of the cell. Then she was going to kick the old man's ass for ever having done such a stupid thing as... well, anything he'd ever done.

Then she was going to find out who did this.

There was also a fear, deep down underneath everything, that she might hurt someone. Rita didn't mind hurting people. The old man had deserved every singed eyebrow or black eye she'd given him. But injuring someone who had nothing to do with this, that's what she was afraid of and really, that's what kept her from blowing off her door.

She didn't want to think about how it very well could be that Gnome had hurt someone who maybe didn't need to be hurt when she had broken herself out.

So she stayed in her cell and just yelled. It didn't help much, but it was better than sitting and moping about how stupid this whole _conscience_ thing was.

"So help me, if Flynn doesn't get his ass in here -"

"You're going to blow me up too?" As if summoned, the commandant appeared, flanked by two soldiers who looked properly nervous about the way Rita's hair was smoking.

"I didn't blow anything up. That's bullshit and you know it."

Flynn looked awful. His face was dirty and his hair looked greasy. How long had he been awake? How long as she been asleep?

"Look, Miss Mordio, what do you want from me? There's a lot on my plate right now."

His tone, more than his words, was what gave her pause. He sounded worse than he looked and she'd never seen the stick in his ass ease that much.

Pause was not enough to quell her anger though.

"Look, Flynn, I don't know what the hell is going on. All I know is I woke up somewhere I didn't go to sleep, the old man came to get me, and I get back to find everything going to heck in a handbasket."

Flynn just stared at her for a long moment, as if trying to decide if she was telling the truth. Then he sighed, and reached out a hand towards one of the guards, who laid a ring of keys in it.

"I'm going to let you out," Flynn said, "and then we are going to have a talk about what happened."

Her lab hadn't been blown up, but it had been ransacked.

"Son of a bitch, what the hell happened in here? Not enough to kidnap me, they have to ruin my work too?" Rita immediately ran to turn over an engine that had been knocked on its side. Great, exhaust pipes were dented and a tinkling rattle of other parts knocked loose in the depths of the machinery. "Dammit, I'm gonna kill those bastards." She managed to keep herself from whispering sweet nothings to the dented metal. The soul of blastia was hard to forget sometimes.

Flynn let out an embarrassed cough and she whirled on him, knowing exactly what he was going to say.

"Um, actually..."

"Oh you have got to be kidding me," was all she could think to say.

"Some of the men got a little... over-zealous while investigating."

Rita stood in the middle of scattered papers and shattered glass as Flynn told her about what had happened since the night of the party - which was only the night before last, she found out finally. It felt like it had been a lifetime.

"And you don't remember any of what happened to you before waking up in whatever confinement it was?"

"No, last thing I remember was making it to my lab. What happened to that doctor?"

"We placed him under arrest, but we found him dead in his cell not long after the explosions."

"Blown up?"

"Poisoned," said one of the other guards before Flynn got a chance to answer, which clearly Flynn was not pleased with.

"That's enough, Patter."

"Poisoned?" Rita raised an eyebrow. The doctor had been annoying, but she hadn't wanted to kill him. He was just a curious man with no sense of personal space.

"Yes, but we're keeping that quiet for now," Flynn said pointedly. "Am I clear? You're still not free of suspicion yourself, Miss Mordio."

"Whatever," was all she had to say, and she picked up a sheaf of scribbled notes from under her desk. "I just want a bath." Her chest itched, and she tried not to think about how it was Raven's blood and her own sick still dried on her skin.

"We can make that happen," Flynn said, and he ran a hand down his face as if relieved that this was going fairly smoothly.

"What happened to the old man?" Rita asked, the thought of him now forefront in her mind. "Last I saw him, he was with the angry guy on the boat."

"Raven's been placed under house arrest for the time being."

"What about me?" She turned to face him now. "I dare you to lock me in that cell again."

"Miss Mordio, please do not think I would hesitate to do anything that would further the well-being of the people or their safety. If that involves locking you up, so be it. I'd rather you didn't antagonize things, your situation being what it is."

She stared at him and he stared back.

"So?"

"So we're asking that you remain in your lab until further notice. Seeing as how that's been your mode of operation anyway, I'm hoping that won't be too much of a burden."

He was trying to be friendly, she realized. Trying to be friendly and really bad at it.

"Where's Raven being held?"

"He's going to be under guard at the guild headquarters."

"That's stupid. Just keep him here."

"I don't think so. Miss Mordio, your association with Raven has not gone unnoticed before now and his involvement with this whole affair is decidedly suspicious."

"'Association'? What the hell does that mean?"

Flynn ignored the question.

"This is so stupid," Rita snorted. "When is someone going to get out there to get those people I left in the crater? They'll answer your questions right quick. Just keep the asshole here."

Flynn stopped short of running a hand down his face again, but he sighed heavily.

She knew what his issue was. She, of all the members of Brave Vesperia, and maybe most of the world currently, had the single greatest potential for destruction. Short of killing her, or whatever it was that Beatrice and her henchman had done to restrain her, she couldn't be _made _to do anything. And without the jump on her, both of those methods were unlikely to be successful. Estelle would have been ashamed of her, but Rita knew all of these things and was not concerned about exploiting them. She'd been through enough shit over the past few days that had made her feel powerless, she wasn't above exploiting her power now.

"You can put us under twenty four hour surveillance or whatever. I don't care."

"Rita..." The fact that he was using her name meant she was wearing him down.

"You're going to be guarding both of us anyway. Consolidate some of that precious manpower you were talking about. You need me to get this mess up and running again and Raven can help me do it." She gestured eloquently to the upturned laboratory.

She knew she'd won when Flynn sighed yet again and one of his guards shifted uncomfortably.

"I will consider it as an option," the commandant said finally. And without much else to say, he just left. The guards followed him slowly and closed the door behind them, but she heard them settle in comfortably at the sides of the entrance.

Rita realized that her hands were trembling and she crossed her arms, tucking them tightly against her sides.

What the hell had that even been about? Why the hell was she sticking up for the old man? If anything, she'd been trying to kick him out for the past few weeks.

But somewhere along the line, he had become a constant, like a tacky piece of furniture that cluttered up the corner and didn't match the rug. But it was familiar and, like the actual tacky chair in the corner, she'd gotten used to him. It's not like she needed him, but he did have a heavier boot than she did if ever anything needed a kick. And he understood alphabetization, which was more than she could say for Witcher, who was trying to use some stupid number system.

The thought of apple-head made her cringe. Likely going to take this as an opportunity to lord it over the castle research for a while, even if the little dweeb hadn't done a thing about the central heating yet. Now that there were big gaping holes in the wall, maybe he would get around to getting off his ass.

And now she was stuck in here. Not that she was planning on leaving anyway, but dammit, it was the principle of the thing.

o-o-o

They were really serious about the whole house arrest thing. When Flynn finally finished grilling him, they made Raven sit on the boat while someone found a bucket of water that could be considered lukewarm if really generous and against all hope, there were a couple of clean towels in one of the cabinets in the hold.

"Can't an old man get a 'lil privacy?" he begged, figuring there was no place for dignity really anymore.

The guards were unmoved by his pleading. Yuri, however, was not amused.

"Okay, you guys, this has gone far enough. Get out. Give the guy a minute to himself, huh? There's only one door. Let him be."

The guards were not Flynn - they might have heard about Yuri, but not dealt with his physical insistence in person - and so it was with wide-eyes and unsure muttering that they were all but pushed out of the room.

The skin around his blastia was still angry and red, and his arm was still sore, but he felt better beyond a lingering headache and wanting to have about thirty six more hours more sleep. But it was unnerving to see the bright fresh line that branched out in a crooked arc from the edges of the plate. Scars had never concerned Raven in his past, back before the white rays had spread across one side of his chest. Back before scars had defined him, back when they had just been a side-effect of what he'd done with his life rather than what his life was made of. Somewhere along the line, they'd become something terrifying, a reminder of his mortality.

So he just avoided looking at it and swiped at it until it felt mostly clean. The rest of his skin followed suit, and whatever clean water was left in the bucket got dumped over his head. It wasn't complete, but it was better than nothing. At least he didn't smell like a barnyard anymore.

He didn't bother telling them he was finished. Instead, he just stripped off what was left of his clothes and left them in a neat pile in front of the door. Hopefully they would get the hint when they came back in that someone needed to get him some clean clothes if they didn't want him lounging around naked in this jail of theirs. Then he wrapped himself in the blanket and laid down on the bunk that Rita had occupied. That was immediately a bad idea, he realized, as she hadn't been any cleaner than him when she'd been on it, but it was too late now because even the smell of her sweat and blood was not enough to make him get up now that he'd gotten his head on a pillow.

The hearty knock of Captain Marlow at the door made him at least open his eyes quite a bit later though and then he really did regret laying down in the smell of panic because it almost made him sick.

"Please, enter my humble abode," he muttered around trying to keep his bile down. Didn't know if anyone actually heard him, but the door opened anyway and the captain stepped in.

"Raven, sorry to disturb you." He didn't miss how Raven was wrapped in the blanket or how the clothes were piled next to an empty bucket, but he also didn't comment on it.

"At yer service always, of course," Raven said. Didn't care too much how snarky it might have come out.

"There's been a change in plans."

o-o-o

They dropped him off with barely a "how do you do" and wrapped in a dirty blanket, a guard on either side of him as if he were actually dangerous instead of just an annoying, overzealous, ancient specimen on a man. If you wanted to even call him a "man."

She didn't really acknowledge them at first beyond shouting at the door when a heavy thumping came from the other side and she heard it swing open.

"Hey," she called from a space between a bookshelf and a workbench that was miraculously still standing, not able to see more than their feet at that point. Weird that she knew it was the old man, despite his bare feet, which she thought was weird, and there was a lot of glass on various parts of the floor and while she didn't mind picking the occasional sliver out of her own heel and it was the idiot's damn fault if he didn't wear shoes, she didn't know what chemicals had been spilt onto the floor until she did inventory and some of them could be a bit worse than a splinter or two of glass.

"Don't move," she ordered, concentrating on twisting a set of wires back into working order so her table saw would work again.

"But ma'am," came a tremulous guards' voice, "we were ordered to bring him in here."

"Yeah, well, do you want your boots to melt? Stay put until I find you somewhere to stand, old man," she called.

"Whatever ya say, Rita darlin'," came the weary response, and her throat tightened all the way down as she remembered the tiny noise he had made when she had pulled off his shirt.

When she scooted herself out from the crevice though, she stared for a long moment and Raven stared back. She didn't care what he thought in the slightest. She'd hiked up her skirt and tied it into some sort of pseudo pants, so that it wasn't constantly tugging itself down her chest with its own weight. She'd had run a tub of water in the little corner washroom tucked in the back of her lab, but hadn't bothered to soak in it yet, not with all the mess that had to be cleaned up anyway. She stank and her hands were greasy, but she was pretty sure she didn't look as bad as the old man.

It had only been about twelve hours at most since she had seen him last, and he'd looked bad then. But it was an urgent sort of terrible, one that would improve when his wounds were sealed and the dirt was gone and he'd had a rest. But this...

His eyes were sunk deep, with puffy bags of grey hanging under them. His shoulders were hunched, and his gaze was blank. Wrapped in a blanket and meekly being escorted, he looked... old, and the unbidden memory of that glimpse into his mind, that jaunt through his memories, flashed through her head. She blinked it away and as if he were mimicking her, Raven's eyelids lowered and raised in a weary blink.

"Get out," she said, and he knew she wasn't talking to him.

The guards apparently didn't hear her and began to rattle off instructions.

"You two are to remain in these chambers twenty-four hours except in the case of-"

"Get the hell out," Rita raised her voice, "or else I will throw you out, got it?"

They still didn't move fast enough for her and she got four steps towards them before they realized that she was serious. She got all the way up to standing in front of Raven when the door finally slammed shut behind them. The old man just looked down at her and she scowled up at him.

"What did you do?" she demanded, indicating his... everything.

He didn't answer for a minute, just smiled a very small smile that was incredibly unnerving. All of a sudden, she didn't want him there, but she wasn't quite sure why. And if she didn't know about something, it wasn't important, so she shrugged off the feeling and instead glared at the old man so he would stop smiling at her.

But he didn't.

"You're a wonder, Rita Mordio." And he raised his hand to rest it gently on her head. Before she could slap it away, he ruffled her dirty hair. Then he withdrew like a turtle into the folds of his blanket, drawing it up to his chin. Rita realized, between his naked forearm and bare feet, that he wasn't wearing anything under the cloth.

"Whatever," she growled. "Go take a bath, old man."

That led to a fight, which let her forget about the lingering feeling of his thumb brushing against the curl of her ear. He complained about having to take another bath, when she was fairly positive that whatever cleaning he'd had didn't count as a "bath". He insisted she go first, she told him to shove it up his ass, he needed more rest than she did. She won, of course, because he really did need the rest and so had to give up his argument, and so he shuffled off like a cocoon on legs to the cramped little tub with steaming water.

By the time he emerged, quite a while later, Rita was hunched over several buckets, sorting out screws and bolts that had gotten dumped on the floor.

"Thought you had fallen asleep and drowned," she said without looking at him. "Clothes on my desk."

When he'd closed the door safely behind himself, Rita had stomped right to the door to her lab and slammed it open to satisfying response from the guards.

_"What the hell?" she demanded. She wasn't used to being the most thoughtful person in a group and it was kind of weirding her out. The guards, predictably at this point, jumped and looked confused. _

_"Got any clothes for the poor guy? What's the big idea with dropping him off naked, you perverts?"_

_It was like no one but her was thinking of anything but their own asses. It took far too long to get ahold of someone who could leave a post long enough to go dig up some clothes for Raven, and when it finally got to them, it was pretty much just an armful of castoffs that were probably either too big or too small, but at least they were clean. _

"In yer debt as always, Rita m'dear," came the weary response and she heard the sounds of clothing rustling.

"Couldn't get any shoes," she said, her meaning apologetic even if her tone was not. His only reply was a muffled grunt as he apparently got himself stuck in a shirt from the sound of it. She ignored him and sorted through another handful of hardware.

"Gotcha another bath set up," Raven said as he apparently got things sorted out. She turned to him then – yeah, the shirt was definitely too small in the shoulders. He met her gaze, then looked away and surveyed the damaged lab.

"They didn't ruin my rug, did they?"

"It wasn't your rug," Rita huffed, but she pointed, then turned back to her buckets. The floor covering had been saved from the ravage of acid and glass alike by being flipped carelessly into a corner.

o-o-o

Raven sighed. It was only with a little surprise that he realized 'home' had become more the worn rug in Rita's lab than the plush pillows of his room. He was tired all of a sudden. Tired and nervous and full of impulses he should definitely not be allowed to act on. A man should only be allowed to fear for someone's life but so many times in a lifetime and Raven had had enough with leaving things unsaid.

But this was not the time or the place or the person.

"C'mon, genius mage," he wheedled, trying to pretend the sight of that one rug unharmed had sent a wave of complicated feelings through him – most of which weren't related to the rug at all – that made his knees weak, "don't be like that."

"I'll be however I want to be," she said absently, but he could hear her clenched teeth.

"Well, stinky ain't exactly attractive nor healthful, Rita darlin', so into the bath with you."

He won this fight, but only because she could smell herself as strongly as he could.

"I just want to finish this," she ended weakly, putting another handful of screws into the correct bucket.

"Oh fer – I'll do it, just go get out of that dress, would ya?"

And she glared and he didn't care, because she was there.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Considered holding onto this chapter, since it got finished really, really quickly and there's no guarantee when the next one's coming out because of life, but then I figured you guys deserved it as soon as it was done._

_Lots of falling asleep and waking up in this chapter._

_Note that this is based on the XBox version of the game, where Flynn is not a party member. I'm just taking advantage of tensions that could arise from him not necessarily knowing certain members of the party very well. _

_Also, been reading through the entirety of this behemoth and noticing some inconsistencies and continuity errors that come of the story having taken three years (three frickin' years already!) to come out. So yeah, if you noticed any, by all means point them out. Sooner or later, I'll go through and do a bit ol' edit. _

_Also also, finally got around to using that sweet line from my summary. Booyah._


	12. Chapter 12

Being clean had never been one of Rita's highest priorities. If anything, not caring about being dirty had been an advantage for her in her life as a blastia researcher. Whether hip-deep in mud for an excavation, spattered with monster blood while doing field work, or covered in grease from lab experiments, there just never seemed to be the time or the hot water for a proper wash up, so she didn't bother.

But Rita was in no way opposed to a good bath. They were too much work to set up, too much time away from her work, but damn they were nice. She'd only tagged along to Nan's birthday trip because they were going to the hot springs. Hot water heaters were something she'd converted within days of mana. The castle didn't have the energy capacity yet for completely blastia-free water yet, but a few carefully placed generators and at least the kitchens, public bathrooms and infirmaries could get by. Not every private washroom had hot water yet, but Rita had spoiled herself with this luxury in the lab, which she then promptly proceeded not to use, even though Estelle had seen the washroom stocked with bath salts and shampoos alike.

The old man had run the water nearly scalding and even now it was almost too hot to enter. But there was also a layer of bubbles and Rita could feel the slick salts in the water. Rita considered yelling at him for being perverted, but she couldn't really decide on what grounds to base it, so she gave up and just sank into the water. She watched the dirt dissolve off her skin in little smoky waves and felt the knots in her muscles slowly untie themselves. It took three full tubs of wash and rinse before she felt anything like clean again - an abominable waste of water, but who was keeping track? - and at last she was soaking in clear water, no soap or dirt, and fully convinced she was never going to get the wrinkles out of her skin.

And she was crying. She hadn't realized at first: the stinging in her eyes was just remnants of her shampoo and it was breathing the steam that was making her chest feel heavy and clogged. It wasn't until a yawn turned into a sob and the hand that went up to stifle it was shaking that she realized what was going on.

This was so stupid. She was fine. Everything was fine. And if it wasn't fine, it was fixable. Buildings could be rebuilt, notes could be rewritten. But still she kept crying.

This was so stupid.

o-o-o

He wasn't trying to listen in, but after the first hour, he got a little concerned. But the pipes turned on and off occasionally and there was quiet splashing, so he knew that she was still awake and hadn't sunk to the bottom of the tub. But then another half hour of silence and finally he carefully approached the door, intending to knock and check on her. As he raised his knuckles, however, he heard a gentle splash and a deep, hiccuping sigh.

Oh hell. He was not cut out for this.

He knocked anyway.

"Doin' okay in there, genius mage?"

"Go away, perv." But he heard it in her voice.

"Needa come out before ya turn inta a prune."

She didn't respond, but he heard her sniffle.

"C'mon, I'll get ya yer clothes." Nope, nope, don't think about how creepy _that_ sounded. "Did ya ever unpack those?"

Of course not. Her wrenches and magnifying glasses and work gloves had all been pulled out and strewn about the lab within hours of arrival, but her clothes had only been grabbed when the article before was completely unwearable for whatever reason. In the entire time he'd been in the lab, Raven had only seen Rita's outer layers change a handful of times, always straight from the duffel.

But, of course, that handful of times had been enough to deplete the supply and Raven was left with nothing but a pair of mismatched socks.

This was too much. Hell, the damn rug had been too much. What was he going to do with a naked crying mage?

But there was the pile of clothes still on the desk that he'd sorted through. There was a shirt in there that had been even smaller than the one he'd squeezed himself into, but Rita would probably still be swimming in it. None of the pants looked liked they'd stay up around three of Rita, but he grabbed a pair anyway, and tossed on one of her sashes, one of the few clothing items that were in abundance around the lab. He took far too long through the whole process, hoping that she would get fed up with waiting and come after him on her own so he wouldn't have to face that door again. But of course he had no such luck, if indeed he had any luck at all anymore, and he had to knock again with the pile of clothes under his arm, unmated socks on top.

The door opened just a crack and her arm came around the jamb before he could close his eyes, her wrinkly fingers outstretched and waiting. Raven felt the heat of his blush rise in his cheeks at her bare elbow, and he thrust the bundle of clothing at her and whirled around with his back to the door. What was he, twelve? The door closed behind him and he stood in place for far too long, staring at his double-socked-because-they-couldn't-find-him-boots toes. Then he realized that it would be incredibly creepy for him to still be outside the door when she emerged.

o-o-o

She was pretty sure he hadn't noticed. Wiping her nose one more time, she tugged her sash-as-a-belt tighter and opened the door.

Raven was sorting the screws and bolts into the buckets the way he'd said he would, shoulders still hunched beneath his too-tight shirt and his hair hanging loose in a curtain around his face while it dried. The sight sent little jitters down her spine that pooled in her stomach. She didn't want to think about them, so she just looked away, trying to find something to occupy herself. There was just so much to do.

"Ya got any skin left?" he asked her, but she didn't turn. She also couldn't think of a response, so she just didn't respond.

That apparently was okay with Raven, which was fine with her.

Raven was so focused on being unobtrusive that when Rita herself finally spoke, he almost shushed her to keep from bothering Rita. And between that panicked realization and stopping himself from stopping her, he missed what she said entirely.

"Er, what was that, Rita darlin'?" he asked, hoping the good ol' finger in his ear would get him out of this one. He wasn't sure as to its effectiveness though, because she just shrugged.

"Never mind. It's not important."

Was all of this punishment for something? What had he done in his entire life that had warranted this? Was it Alexei? Surely being scared enough of someone to do what they wanted wasn't so heinous a crime that Raven should have this sinking feeling deep in his throat when a sixteen year old girl said something 'not important'. One of these days he was going to have to examine his life so he could repent and rid himself of this karma.

"Nothin' ya say can ever be not important," was what his brain decided was apparently the best start. "Yer Rita Mordio, genius mage of Aspio."

"Shut up, old man," came the snapped response. "I said it didn't matter."

"Aw, are ya embarrassed?" Honestly, did he not possess self-control? Of course that was a stupid question, because he was still sitting on his stool and she was still across the room. Hell, he was still looking at the screws instead of at her.

"I said 'thanks', okay? Thanks for coming to rescue me, even if it was a boneheaded thing to do!"

Raven turned then and stared at the back of her neck. She was standing ramrod stiff, with her arms down on her sides and her fists balled tight, steadfastly not looking at him.

"Yer welcome."

He hadn't expected that to be what set her off.

Rita was not most people. He knew that already. But still, most people had a better sense of their own feelings that basic etiquette wouldn't cause them to blow a fuse. But this was the genius mage and instead she flipped her desk. No fanfare, no yelling, just grabbed the edge and upended nearly two men's weight worth of books and equipment.

"Rita," Raven began, getting to his feet, but he was cut off by Rita herself.

"Damn _it,_" she hissed, and the way her weight shifted, he realized she'd stepped on some of the glass that littered the floor. Why hadn't that been the first thing he'd done? Sweep up the damn glass? Why had he decided that finishing some inane sorting task the mage had started – Rita, who didn't have enough common sense to fill a shot glass – was more important than basic safety?

"Whoa there," he said as she hopped up on one foot to examine the damage. "Don't go gettin' it in your other foot too."

He picked his way over to her where she was standing like a little lost duckling, one foot raised and dripping blood slowly.

"Okay, okay," he said, as she reached out automatically and gripped the front of his shirt to help herself balance. "Hold on, lemme see. See if you'd worn those socks I gave ya..."

Her foot was cold and wrinkled as he caught it and steadied her. But he blood that was trickling in a thin line smeared across her heel was warm as it coated his fingers. He realized then, and only then, that all the blood there had been when he had found her had been his. She had been fine. Not a scratch on her. At least none on her body. And that was a good thing, because the sight of blood on her now was making his hands shake.

"And you just took a bath," he said, trying to reassure himself. He wasn't ready for the hysterical giggle in response. Rita never laughed at his jokes. Never.

And she was crying again.

He couldn't do this. Not with her right there in front of him.

He was going to hell.

"Hey, hey now." For one brief moment, he wasn't sure if comforting her was the best response. This was Rita, who had once punched Karol square on the nose for offering to help carry her bag. Rita Mordio did not ask for nor require help.

But then she buried her face in his shoulder just above where her fingers were twisted in the fabric of his shirt. She was hiding, not necessarily looking for comfort, he understood, but that part of him that was definitely going to burn for this gently wrapped an arm around her shoulders, trying to keep his now-bloody hands away from her.

"It's all right now. It's just a little blood." He could at least preserve her dignity a little. But the way her grip, if anything, tightened on his shirt made him pause. Rita never asked for anything, she just took it. Had anyone ever even bothered to offer before? The thought was disturbing, but the realization that her flipping her desk had been the healthiest way she had dealt with her feelings in a long time – really, probably since long before he'd known her – made Raven's arm tighten a little. He disguised it by reaching down and scooping up the back of her knees, lifting her up and cradling her gently.

"Let's get you somewhere a little less glass-ified."

She remained quiet and that was more terrifying than her lashing out at him. He could feel the damp patch on his shirt slowly spreading as she silently wept into it.

He set her down in the worn old chair in the corner that neither of them ever used, despite how thoughtful Estelle or someone had been to put it there. The glass shard in her foot wasn't all that bad, but removing it was complicated by the fact that Rita never let go of Raven's shirt. He had to half-sit on the arm of the chair, half-draw her up into his lap in order to pull the glass out and wrap her heel with a bandage from her unsurprisingly overstocked first aid kit.

Raven found himself murmuring soothing nothings as he worked, and she stopped shaking and crying after a little while, but her grip never loosened.

"Can I go wash my hands?" Raven asked when it was clear she was going to hold on until they were both dust. Not that he really minded, but the red on his hands was bothering him way more than it should. It wasn't like he had ever seen her blood before. Paper cuts, monster scratches, hell, blows from Alexei's damn sword. He'd feared for her, for all of his friends, before. But something was different now and he was too much of a coward to deal with that realization properly.

Her grip loosened slowly.

"I'll be right back, I promise."

"Shut up, old man," she mumbled, but her heart wasn't in it and she wasn't looking at him.

o-o-o

He was staring at her, the same way he'd been staring at her at the party. She knew without looking at him. She could practically _hear _the furrow between his eyebrows. But she couldn't meet his gaze, not with the snot threatening to run down her lip and her eyes still burning around the edges. She just wanted him to go away so she could wipe her nose.

Finally, _finally_, he took the hint and picked his way across the room to wash his hands in the lab sink. Rita watched him go, brave enough to stare at the back of his head, his hair still loose. But even that was painful, so she closed her eyes and curled up into herself. She wanted him to come back. Something, anything, to keep her grounded in reality. There had been a moment while she was floated in the bath, her head tilted back and her eyes closed, that she'd dozed off and there had been a sense of dark, bodiless, weightlessness and she hadn't known where she was. She wanted something to prove she wasn't alone.

But she also wanted him to stay away. When he had picked her up, all the memories that weren't hers, those things that she had seen in his head, had flicked before her. He'd carried people like this before, dead and dying people. He'd carried _her _like this, when she was limp and lifeless, and it had been blood soaking his shirt rather than tears. Rita had felt the cold weight catching in the crooks of his arms as if they had been her arms. She didn't want to feel that again.

More than that, she didn't want _him _to feel that again.

He came back, the socks she had left behind in the washroom in his hand, and she tried not to flinch when he held them out to her.

"Ya got feet like ice, genius mage," he said and she still couldn't look at him when she took the socks because she suddenly realized she didn't care what _he _felt at this moment, and that made her a terrible person.

o-o-o

He was trying to keep her hands away from him. He hadn't realized how hard it would be to keep his hands away from her. Watching her put on her socks, he wanted to straighten out the crooked toe-end she left hanging, or pull her shirt up over her shoulder where it was starting to slump, or just comb her hair because it was sticking up in all directions and still dripping a little in some places.

He should go finish sorting those screws. Or pick up the desk. Or sweep up that damn glass. Anything but stay this dangerously close to her

But then she took the decision away from him by reaching out and grabbing at his shirt again.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Short breather chapter. Poor Yuri hasn't gotten a point-of-view section in two chapters now._


	13. Chapter 13

When Flynn told Yuri he wasn't allowed to leave the city, he hadn't been joking. When Yuri tried to sneak out of one of the Lower Quarter exits from the city, there had been guards there. They were nominally there to keep strangers – or really anyone – from entering the city, but they were also there to keep anyone from leaving. But Yuri was on their list of people to "especially keep from leaving" and so the swordsman had to grit his teeth and return to the city square and the temporary headquarters of everything that had sprung up there.

In one of the hospital tents, Estelle was bent over Karol's arm, flanked by two bodyguards that eyed Yuri suspiciously. Tensions were still high in the city, despite no explosions going on for at least twenty-four hours. The military had all but moved outside the castle, moved outside into temporary tent setups in the upper quarter courtyards, looking for all the world like a war camp in the middle of the capital. Yuri had been eyed suspiciously by every soldier he'd passed – clearly the word had been spread that he wasn't allowed to leave the city – and even when he was sitting obediently in the first aid tent, there was an atmosphere of hostility that was directed towards him as much as anything else. Because no one was sure who had done this to the city.

Estelle looked up and smiled at him when he entered – one of those thing she did occasionally that made his heart skip whole beats – but then she was back to sending waves of energy into Karol's arm. All around, there was a bustle of activity, of making the not-well well again, no tiring, no pauses. And Yuri sat in the middle of it, completely useless.

"Hey Cap'n, what happened there?" Yuri asked, gesturing at the guild leader and his arm that had a quickly-fading bruise.

"Oh this, heh," Karol chuckled self-deprecatingly, flexing his fingers as the last of Estelle's light faded from his elbow. "Had to get some water and fell carrying some buckets. I'm fine."

"He broke his wrist in two places," Estelle insisted, even as she moved onto the next patient. A good night's sleep had put color back in her face and she seemed to have learned something about pacing her healing, having gone from sinking in a full recovery every time to putting one wave through, checking progress, then another only if it was really needed. There were still bruises and soreness left when she was done, but it was better than bleeding out.

Karol, on the other hand, looked rough. His eyes were bloodshot and Yuri realized that the kid probably hadn't slept much the night before. Yuri himself had crashed behind one of the piles of rubble outside the medical tent, lulled to sleep by the smell of wilting flowers and trash piles from the Lower Quarter, with Repede curled up by his head. He had a sore back and his clothes were wrinkled all to hell, but at least he'd slept okay. Karol looked like a zombie.

"Oh, hey, Yuri," Karol said, blinking heavily and flexing his arm again. "How are Raven and Rita?"

"They're okay, as far as I could tell. Flynn's pissed at them, but they'll be fine."

"Well, LeBlanc was telling me about Raven being locked up in Rita's lab. I mean, are they going to be okay together?"

Yuri frowned in thought. He hadn't heard about that. There was something about Rita and Raven together that made him uncomfortable and he hadn't quite put his finger on it. If he hadn't known better, he would say that there was something going on between them. Perhaps even more dysfunctional than Karol and Nan, but something. But that had to be impossible. Raven couldn't breathe in proximity to Rita without getting hit, let alone lay a hand on her.

And yet...

Yuri had heard the way Raven had called her name, and how Rita had instantly relaxed. The old man had known exactly where to go looking for Rita when she went missing. The fact that Raven was _still alive_ after getting drunk off his ass and dragged away by an also-drunk Rita. That Raven had dropped everything to go get Rita, half-killing himself in the process...

It all made Yuri very uncomfortable. It's not that Rita couldn't take care of herself. And Raven had always been something of a lech, especially when it came to Judith, who no man could ever touch without her permission. And nothing had come of it. But for some reason, the idea was...

Yuri needed to have a talk with the old man. What had Flynn been thinking, putting them together, an old man and a teenage girl? Clearly Raven had done a better job of making himself completely harmless and ignored that even Yuri could have predicted. Either that, or Flynn was really asleep at the wheel on all of this. It was weird, even thinking about this. He didn't even think too hard about Estelle most days, because that would lead him down roads he wasn't ready to travel.

"I'm sure they'll be fine," is what he actually said to reassure the kid. Karol didn't look convinced. Estelle happened to look over from across the tent, but she hadn't heard what they were talking about, and Yuri returned her smile absently while he digested information, and she returned to her work again.

"How're you feeling now?" he asked Karol. "Because we need to go take care of some stuff."

Karol was clearly on his last leg, but he shrugged his shoulders and looked around for his axe. "Let's go!"

Yuri did not like leave Estelle behind, but the guards on either side of her were glaring even at the nurses and patients, so there likely wasn't anything that Yuri himself could add to this situation right now. Besides, Estelle would refuse to leave again. So he slipped out before she could look up again, Karol slowly but determinedly in tow.

It was easier to get ahold of Flynn than he would have thought. The commandant was standing in the middle of the square, Sodia a faithful shadow pointing and shouting orders as Flynn relayed them.

"Decide the castle was safe enough to head back in?" Yuri asked, indicating how a mix of soldiers and workers were dismantling some of the tents. While Estelle was still toiling in the city square.

"We've swept through the castle and haven't found any other instances of explosives," Sodia answered, her tone sharp but unusually chatty.

"Better not have, seeing as how you've locked Rita and Raven in there," Yuri snapped.

"Seems you were right," Flynn added calmly, not looking up from a clipboard in his hands. "Rita seems to have been the target."

"What made you decide that?" Karol asked, pretending he wasn't leaning on his axe handle.

"Here's hoping she's not a target anymore, seeing as how you just locked in the damn castle." Yuri was not going to let this go.

Flynn didn't seem too interested in explaining himself. But he was pissed, Yuri could tell.

"We're putting together an team to go on location where Rita was found. If either of you is interested in joining."

Son of a bitch. He knew good and well that Yuri was interested in going. But now Flynn was going to make him ask for it.

Flynn still didn't look up as Yuri glared at him for a long moment, but Sodia noticed and was glaring back.

"Are you sure I'd be allowed out of the city?" Yuri ground out. Sodia blinked at him without changing expression and Flynn finally looked up without moving his head.

"Don't be like this, Yuri. We're leaving tomorrow at dawn." And that was all he had to say, turning on his heel and disappearing into a line of soldiers carrying boxes, Sodia trailing faithfully behind him.

"Dammit," Yuri growled under his breath.

"So what are we gonna do now?" Karol asked.

"You are going to get some rest."

"I'm f-"

"No, you're not fine. The military thinks the castle's safe for habitation now, so if you trust these bucket-heads, you could even get a good night's sleep in your own bed."

"But-"

"Nope, no arguments, Cap'n. You gotta get some sleep so you can keep me company on our expedition tomorrow, right?"

"S-sure."

o-o-o

Raven woke up with Rita's head tucked under his chin. He hadn't fallen asleep with it there, and so there was a long moment as he tried to blink away the vague dreams of cold and dust and figure out what she was doing in his lap.

Not just in his lap, but curled up in a ball with a hand still twisted in the fabric of his shirt. Her body was tucked against his in the deep expanse of the chair, with her legs sideways across his and her toes jammed into the crack between chair arm and cushion. The last he remembered, she had been sitting next to him, sure, but it'd just been next to him, her face against the side of his arm. He'd told her stories of before the Great War, of the Great War, but nothing about after the war. She hadn't told him any stories – which he felt was a little unfair – but she'd listened quietly without crying again and there had been a minimal number of mumbles of "idiot," so he'd count it as a win.

And he'd kept his hands to himself, one carefully across her shoulders to keep her weight from putting it to sleep, and the other in the pocket of his borrowed pants. But now, with her fitting against his side and breathing into his neck, his arm had apparently found its way around her waist and his hand rested comfortably on her hip.

The realization had him frozen in panic. But Rita's breathing was deep and steady, so there was still a chance he could extract himself without ending up dead. But she was entirely on top of him and he couldn't so much as shift his weight without her hand tightening at his chest and her breath blowing out in a quiet sigh.

It was... comfortable. He didn't want it to be, but it was. His heart couldn't hammer in his chest the way it was supposed to, but that didn't mean it wasn't trying its damndest. And yet Rita continued to breath gently against him.

"Rita darlin'," he breathed, "Ol' Raven's needin' ya ta wake up and kick his ass right about now."

And of course she didn't. Because that would have been easier. Instead, she mumbled a string of incoherent numbers and her face snuggled into his collarbone a bit more securely. He could feel her pulse where her ribcage was pressed against his. He'd almost forgotten what heartbeats felt like. Sure, he fantasized, if it could be called that, about his heart beating again, with phantom memories of the feeling. But having it right there, close enough to where it should belong, made him realize that he had forgotten exactly how fragile it was. Or maybe it was just because the girl in his arms was so fragile.

When he had pulled her up from the crater, he had known she was light, but it was offset by the hole in the ground and the lingering static in his hair. When he had picked her up the night before, he had cared more about the red on his hands than the lack of effort he had to exert.

But now, with her weight securely settled into him, he realized how little there was of it. Her knees were knobby through the legs of her trousers, and he could feel her shoulder stabbing him in the ribs. There just wasn't much to her.

But dammit, there was so much to her. He'd noticed from the get-go of course, what with her casually rattling off blastia formula and the way she could flick a monster to death with just her scarf, but it had taken him almost two years to see anything more than that. And now...

Shit.

Why did it have to be a tiny slip of a thing, half his age and with a temper shorter than his little finger? Why did she have to be so warm, and her grip so strong?

o-o-o

It bothered Yuri more than he wanted to admit, being basically relegated to holding the figurative dustpan as the knights swept up the tidy pile Rita and the spirits had left for them. Flynn was already patrolling the nooks and crannies looking for clues, so that already would have been redundant if Yuri had tried for some excuse to get out of guard duty. There was nothing for him to do but stand with his arms crossed and look scary to keep the already-cowed prisoners properly intimidated.

Rita had been thorough. Yuri had seen her do some amazing things – he was pretty sure no one else could make "blah blah blah" sound quite that badass, before raining down hellfire and tidal waves – but this was on a whole other level. The building was gone – the crater precise and controlled and there were no pieces left standing bigger than Karol. It was just gone.

Raven had told Yuri that Rita hadn't shouted. Yuri had seen the dead stare Rita had been wearing when the rescue party came aboard the Fiertia.

_"She didn't shout or anything at the poor bastard," Raven had said, curled up in his blanket and trembling slightly while both he and Yuri pretended not to notice. He was also staring straight ahead, dead eyed and twisting a turn of fabric between his fingers absently. _

_"She needs to tell someone about what they did to her. She's not going to tell me."_

That had struck Yuri as odd and he hadn't been able to place why at first. Sure, Rita and Raven had been spending a lot of time together recently and Yuri constantly marveled at the integrity of the old man's hair, but the mage was notoriously tight-lipped. Why would the old man expect or care that Rita wasn't going to tell him something?

But Raven did care. Yuri could see it in his face. And for some reason, that bothered Yuri. More, now that he'd twigged to something going on, though he wasn't quite sure what.

Yuri could sort of see now why Raven was so worried though. While it was impressive, Rita's power, it was also terrifying. Sure, Yuri was pretty sure he could handle just about anything in one-on-one combat, but get Rita worked up enough? He was pretty positive that so long as she had the time to cast, there wasn't anything that could stand in her way.

But this, this was calculated and clean. Rita never did calculated and clean. She was brilliant, sure, but when she was angry, the suffering was nondiscriminatory. Yuri had almost had his head blown off by walking past an argument. Everything and anyone was fair game. But Yuri wasn't sure what the smooth-bottomed crater before him meant, each piece meticulously destroyed rather than haphazardly thrown about and burned. He just knew he didn't like it.

"Even the basements have been destroyed," said Flynn, as if he had been reading Yuri's thoughts as he approached. The commandant's uniform was wrinkled and dirty. Yuri wondered absently if that was bothering Flynn the way it used to when they were kids who didn't know yet what being soldiers meant. It wasn't that Flynn had been afraid to get dirty, but he had always been well-pressed and spotless in contrast to Yuri's haphazard patches and dirty cuffs. It was a petty curiosity and Yuri knew it, but him coming along at all had been petty on Flynn's part.

Flynn's brow was furrowed as he surveyed the damage.

"There's very little left to go on," he continued, though it sounded more like he was talking to himself than to Yuri. " No bodies though."

That had been Repede's job – even the dog got a job before Yuri did – to see if anyone had been left buried beneath the rubble. But that didn't appear to be the case – the prisoners themselves had done counts and checks and everyone who was supposed to be there was there. Not that someone might have escaped – some ringleader or something, and no one was saying anything – but no one was panicking about anyone trapped underground, so that was a start.

There still seemed to be a bit of confusion as to whose house it had been. Well, less house, more mansion, and less confusion, more like the owner hadn't been notified yet and they weren't sure how to. Duke Balleria was going to have to be taken into symbolic custody, when word got out that the genius mage from Aspio had blown his vacation manor up. Flynn seemed pretty convinced, though, that the duke had nothing to do with the events here. In his quest to be a voice for the people, he hadn't been to the manor in months and there was only supposed to be a skeleton maintenance staff. Yuri wanted to know what a champion for the downtrodden needed with a vacation home with its own legion of servants, but apparently that was beside the point. The point was that someone had been using the duke's manor – and everyone seemed positive that was the case, instead of the duke himself – and had kidnapped the genius mage for unknown reasons.

It hadn't been long – hours only, really – before Yuri began hearing the rumors that perhaps Rita hadn't been kidnapped at all and instead she had been on one of her infamous rampages as if she were some sea monster that periodically arose to destroy cities on a kick. Quite a number of people had seen the mage's argument with the nobles about spirits the night of the party, and the connection was apparently too obvious for some people to ignore.

Yuri, though, seemed pretty easy to ignore. The soldiers seemed content to let him stand around and do guard duty, out of the way. He realized that he'd gotten exactly what he wanted when he had been talking to Hank only a few days before. He was a nobody, with no one was noticing him and him being nothing important. And it was killing him. Yuri didn't like to dwell on how his life was treating him or how he felt about things. He was content with being fed occasionally, having the worst luck possible, and getting to swing a sword when he could.

But then Estelle had dropped into his life and his cockiness had started getting him into trouble. Not just "spend a few nights in the clank" trouble, but "people are going to die if you screw this up" trouble. Worse, it had been mostly "people are going to die even if you get this right" trouble. Somewhere along the way, Yuri had gotten used to working with others. Hell, he'd been punched in the face for not doing so. Several times. At some point, he'd gotten used to people doing what he said or doing what other people said. He wasn't just doing what he wanted... He shut down the train of thought before he could get to how he felt about what he had done when he was on his own. But it was becoming more and more tempting, that taste of freedom, of complete lack of accountability.

He just had to decide that a guild was a good idea.

"H-hey, Flynn, uh, commandant!" Speaking of the guild, Karol came crashing onto the scene in his usual way. "We found something!"

The great Flynn allowed Yuri to tag along then as they went to go see what the Cap'n had dug up. Repede sat by it, looking thoroughly disgusted, as he did at most things.

"At a completely un-educated guess," said Sodia, peering down at a shattered panel of something that looked kind of like glass, "this looks like something to do with blastia or spirit research."

"Rita would know," Karol chimed in, completely guileless. It was something that was as endearing as it was irritating, the way the Cap'n just threw his all into every question or comment without necessarily thinking of the full consequences. Yuri watched Flynn chew on the inside of his cheek for a minute, debating.

"Sodia, preserve the site until we can get Witcher on location," he announced finally, delicately stepping around the fact that Rita could run rings around Witcher, even half-asleep.

"Yessir," Yuri heard Sodia chime, as he bent down over the specimen to examine it further. He didn't know the first thing about blastia research, but it did look like those panels that Rita would pull out of thin air when she was programming. But it was solid instead, clearly physical rather than a projection. He wondered if his city-limit arrest included the mage's lab in its "out of bounds" areas. Rita might have some interesting things to say about the couple of scientific squiggles that were still visible. But Yuri was no good at memorization and there was no way he was going to be able to sneak the evidence off the crime scene. His only hope was the Cap'n.

But there was no way to tap Karol to pay attention without alerting the ever-vigilant Sodia or the grumpy Flynn, both of whom looked distinctly uncomfortable with their lack of knowledge on blastia or spirits. So Yuri could only hope that Karol just did that kind of thing unconsciously, or that Witcher wouldn't make a muck of the whole affair. That way, when they got back to the castle, he could send Karol the way of a certain genius mage and see what they could drag out of him.

* * *

><p><em>AN: In case it wasn't obvious, I've basically decided that no one in Vesperia is actually in touch with their feelings. No matter what those feelings or the subject might be. They're all people of action, and thus emotions just sort of get in the way._


	14. Chapter 14

Rita woke up silently. It was usually how she woke up, because she usually didn't remember falling asleep. It was just lifting her head from where it had fallen on the desk and continuing on with whatever she had been doing. But she didn't remember falling asleep this time, and yet she didn't recognize where she was for a long moment. It was far more comfortable – softer and warmer – than her stool.

Raven breathed in slowly beneath her ear, the air whoosing through his chest , unnaturally loud in the absence of his heartbeat.

Oh shit.

Rita sat up, supremely aware that she was sitting across Raven's lap.

The old man started.

"O-oh, Rita, um..."

Rita punched him. It was all she could think to do. She felt the bones of his nose crack beneath her knuckles and he made that sound again, deep in his throat, as if he were suppressing something deeper, something bigger, but refusing to let it out. How long had he been doing that, keeping it all bottled up when it hurt – she _knew _ it hurt?

And then she was on the other side of the room – the huge enormous room, built to bunk several dozen soldiers but now filled with tables and shelves to separate the two of them - and he was still in the chair, both of his hands up to his face, trying to stem the tide of red that was leaking between his fingers.

"You were awake?" It was all she could think to say. Her foot throbbed.

He didn't answer, still clutching at his nose, his face tipped back and blood combing through his sideburns to pool in his ears.

She couldn't look at him, her hands clamped on her elbows, stopping just short of hugging herself.

But it was too much to be in the same room. Now she remembered the feel of his arm around her shoulders the night before, the gentle rumble of his voice as he told her about his childhood, about his battles. And that feeling, that feeling that she knew was there. About her. About everything.

They had been in his head. _She _had been in his head. She knew. She _knew. _

It was too much. She ran into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, her forehead pressed to the warm wood.

Why the hell had she punched him?

o-o-o

Raven had broken most of the bones in his body at this point in his life, but he forgot how much it hurt every single time. And his face was the worst. It wasn't just his nose that hurt, it was his eyes and his tongue and dammit, his ears were ringing so loudly that he could feel it in his throat. Pretty sure he was going to throw up. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Rita say something and a door slam. But it was tinny, like they were coming through a metal pipe, and his vision went black around the edges as he squinted at the ceiling. He had forgotten how much this really, really hurt.

o-o-o

Shit, she'd left him alone. And he was bleeding out. Why the hell had she done that?

_Okay, he won't bleed to death from a broken nose. Calm down. Just get him a towel. There's gels in the bathroom cabinet._

But that meant leaving the bathroom. And that meant seeing him and his bloody chin again.

_Just apologize. _

Right. Just apologize. It was stupid and dumb. She was stupid and dumb. He knew that already.

_Don't think about how for that one second, you felt warm and safe and forgot about everything that had happened. _

Okay.

She opened the door, gels and a towel clutched in her hand.

A gentle moan came from the chair, more of a gargle than anything.

_Shit. _

It took her much longer to cross the room back to him than it did when she wanted to get away from him. By the time she was standing near the chair – and 'near' really meant still out of arm's reach – she was pretty sure he had passed out.

"H-hey," she said, the words catching in her throat. Raven jumped in response, and Rita winced with him as his hands jostled his nose. Dammit, Estelle would have already healed him, or at least she would have been helpful, not leaving the injured – _injured because of you, Rita._

"Rita," he began, sounding as if his nose were clogged – _no shit, Rita, you just clogged his nose with his nose_ – and fading fast, "I'm sorry."

"Shut up, old man. I've got some gels here," was all she could think to say. Never mind that she was the one that was supposed to be sorry here. He had made her comfortable – _no don't think about that right now _– while she had punched him in the face.

When he lowered his hands from his face, she could only stare. She'd smashed his nose to one side and it was swelling up before her eyes, and the bloody handprints on his cheeks made the carnage seem that much worse. His eyes were bloodshot and while she'd given him a black eye or two before this, both of his eyes were clearly going to bruise dark, gel or no gel.

"Here," she said, forcing herself to thrust the towel at him, more throwing it than anything. "And eat these." But since his hands were bloody and full of towel, she found herself stepping forward to shove the gels into his mouth before stepping back again. His lips were dry and chapped where her thumb brushed them.

The effect was almost instantaneous, the blood flow ceasing and the red in his eyes dying down. But the blood was still pooled in his ears, running down his neck, staining his borrowed shirt.

"Better straighten that out before it sticks that way," she found herself mumbling, pointing at her own nose. Raven's response was a small, small smile that made her look away because she couldn't meet his eye, but she saw him raise his hand to his nose and heard a grunt and a snap. She wanted to throw up. Raven hissed gently and then he did throw up. He tried to be considerate about it, hiking himself up and leaning over the arm of the chair, but it still spattered across Rita's ankles. There wasn't much too it – neither of them had eaten in a while, she realized. She tried not to look at it, unsure whether or not she was supposed to rub his back or get him a glass of water. In the end, she just stood there, completely useless.

Neither one of them said anything as Raven brought the towel to his face and began to wipe the blood and sick away. Rita stood at his knee, just out of reach, staring at his shoulder and waiting for him to say something.

"Ah, feel like a new man," Raven said finally. He took the towel away from his face, but his skin was still smeared with streaks of red. Underneath, his cheeks were yellow and he had bags under his eyes. His ears were still full of blood. He looked down at himself and little trickles tipped out to run down his cheeks.

"Feel a bit ungrateful. Don't get many new shirts."

"It was too small for you anyway," Rita said absently. "I'll get you a new one. You should take a bath."

o-o-o

Ordinarily, Raven would have made a joke here. They both knew it. And because he didn't, they were both quiet for a long moment, neither one moving.

"You don't-"

Raven raised an eyebrow when Rita spoke up. The movement hurt. His mouth tasted like blood.

"What was that, Rita darlin'?"

"I'm sorry," she blurted out, fists clenched down by her sides and her face turning red. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her hair fell down in her face. He wanted nothing more than to gather her into the chair with him again and tuck her forehead back under his chin. _No. Bad thoughts. This is why your nose is broken and you're a worthless piece of shit. _

"No need to apologize. Ol' Raven wasn't thinking."

For some reason, she got redder.

"Stop... doing that," she ground out, sounding like she was talking through clenched teeth.

"What's that now?"

"Stop, just stop." She pinched at the bridge of her nose as if it was her that had smashed cartilage, and flapped a frenetic hand at him.

So he just held still until she looked at him, not sure where she was going with this. She sounded irritated and he was already in enough pain. What had he done wrong? He'd apologized, he'd stayed put...

"This is stupid," Rita huffed. Her hand came down and she turned away in a huff.

"Ummm..." Raven wasn't sure if he knew what was going on.

But instead of answering like a normal person, explaining herself like someone who had just told him to stop doing something she hadn't named, or laughing it off like a person who had made a bad joke, she just made her way back to the bathroom. She didn't close the door behind her, but he heard her turn on the tub, the sound thundering through the huge space.

Raven wasn't sure if he was supposed to follow or not – the open door seemed like an invitation but her lack of any sort of verbal confirmation made him hesitate. But he finally stood up, only to be overtaken by severe vertigo. He'd apparently lost more blood than he thought and the gels hadn't quite made up for it. But he didn't want to sit back down – he could feel the cushion clinging to his legs from his own blood. That's when Rita stepped back out, her socks gone and the bottom of her pants wet.

"Take a bath. I'm going to get you some more gels. And clothes." She wasn't looking at him, and she flinched away from him as he approached. He closed the door softly, not looking at her either.

Later, he heard her shouting at the guards, who sounded confused and argumentative. The details were lost as he got undressed, but he had no doubt that Rita would get what she wanted. He added his bloody clothes to the rapidly-growing pile in the corner of the bathroom. The shirt gave him a bit of a panic as it got stuck over his head at point, and his nose twinged so badly that tears ran down his cheeks, but he managed without having to call for help or tear the damn thing.

When he noticed the tub, the tears almost started again but for different reasons. A layer of soap suds floated on the top and when he stepped in, he felt the grit of some bath salts that hadn't quite dissolved yet. All the aches and bruises that he had accumulated the day before made themselves known in force as he sank into the hot water.

Rita, who didn't know how to apologize, had done her best.

As he soaked, he could hear her sweeping up glass, the little tinkling of the shards just audible beyond the door.

"Rita, darlin,'" he called, then paused to blow out a breath. He heard her pause in her work. "I'm feeling like you and ol' Raven need to have a sit down."

The silence ticked for what felt like an eternity. Then the tinkle of glass began again.

"What is there to talk about?" Her voice was sharp and small. He could _hear _the defensive shrug.

Raven swallowed hard and rested his head on the back of the tub and gripped the sides with his hands for a moment. His shins hurt. Everything hurt.

"I'm sorry for scaring you."

"Whatever." The pause in the glass was less-noticeable this time.

Of course. It was a little too much to ask that she reciprocate in actual words.

He was trying to decide what else to say when he heard Rita bark at someone.

"I may be stuck in here, but you can sure as hell knock!"

Someone's apology was cut short by a slammed door. Raven smiled despite himself. It was amazing how many people hadn't figured out how far a little stubbornness could get you with Rita. Raven himself was not a brave man, but he could certainly dig himself a hole and sit in it all he wanted. It got you a lot farther with Rita than just about anything else.

The lab door crashed open again. "And I need a mop!" came Rita's afterthought shout, then she slammed it shut again.

Raven's hands jumped to shield himself when a hearty thump came at the bathroom door.

"No promises on anything in here, old man. And no more clean clothes. The maid thinks we're doing something perverted."

Again, she didn't wait for him to say anything. He heard the fwump of clothes outside the door and then she moved away. Even as he heard the tinkle of the glass start again, he hesitated for a moment before gripping the sides of the tub and hauling himself out.

This shirt didn't fit any better than the last one, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. It was too big and the laces at the throat weren't there anymore, so it hung loose around his shoulders and billowed around him. The pants, on the other hand, were too small, to the point where he genuinely considered asking Rita if she wouldn't mind switching with him, since hers were too big. But the shirt hung down around his thighs, so the way his hips were squeezed into the waistband of the pants was pretty well hidden.

After a moment of consideration, he piled all the dirty clothes into the tub and ran the water over them so they could soak. There was probably no getting the stains out of them now, but judging by the quality of their last few outfits, it would be a while before laundry operations in the castle were up and running again. At least they had a means to wash them. He'd been in a proper prison many a time, and clean clothes were never in good supply. At least he smelled better.

Rita was mopping halfheartedly at the side of the chair with some oil-smeared shop rags. The floor was clean though, with a mop and bucket propped against the wall nearby.

"Really trying to save that thing? It's older than me."

"I like it," she answered without looking up. But she still didn't seem all that enthusiastic about the task.

Raven hesitated.

"We still need to talk, Rita."

She turned to him finally.

"What is it with you and talking?" But she stood up, dirty rag tossed into the bucket. She brushed by him on the way to the bathroom and he heard her washing her hands.

"Well, what else do you want to talk about?" she demanded from inside the bathroom.

Oh, only everything. Like why the hell she'd helped him into his bedroom the night of the party, or why she'd saved him from jail at the cost of having him locked in a room with her. How the hell she'd gotten herself captured and what exactly they'd done to her. Rita was always complaining - and loudly - about whatever situation she was in, and though it had been only a day or two, he hadn't heard her gripe once. And then there was the desk. And her crying. And her laughing at his damn joke. They'd done something to her that she didn't want to talk about and his mind was running a million miles an hour trying to figure out what it was. And yet he didn't want to know the answer.

"Are you okay?" was all he could think to say.

"I'm fine." Her answer was far too quick.

"No you're not." He knew her better than that. But he didn't know how to follow it up. So he just smiled in the way he had perfected for when he didn't know what to say yet, even though she couldn't see it.

"Excuse me?" Rita turned to him. But she wasn't brandishing fireballs. She was accusatory, pugnacious, yes, but she still hadn't come out of the bathroom. They were both so bad at this.

"Rita darlin', I think I know you better than that." He was in too deep. He needed to say this now, or it was never going to get said.

She did emerge from the bathroom then, fists clenched by her side. She looked like she wanted to blow him up, but her hands still weren't smoking.

"Oh, you know so much about me? I know about you, _Raven._" She spat his name as if it were a curse word. "You know there's a story that Schwann was involved in all this shit? Is that what was up with that getup you showed up in? The hell were you doing?"

Raven wiggled a finger in his ear and looked everywhere but at her. She was changing the subject, he knew, but changing it back would just complicate the issue even more.

"Just worried about 'cha, Rita darlin', that's all."

"Well, you shouldn't have been! I can take care of myself."

Raven was angry suddenly. Not at her, but with her. She was sixteen, she shouldn't have to take care of herself. This shouldn't have happened. He wished it hadn't happened. What was he good for if he hadn't seen this coming? There was a time when he would have sniffed out a plot like this before it got anywhere near the castle, let alone Rita. But instead he'd been living with his head up his ass when he could have kept her safe. This was all his fault. Of course he had to be the one to make it right.

None of that was what came out of his mouth. Instead, the anger forgot who it was directed at and instead it spat out exactly the wrong thing.

"Aren't you just above it all, genius mage?"

She whirled on him then, and now her skin was crackling as she seized him by the collar. He could smell ozone and the singed threads of his jacket. It was as if Raven were no longer in control of his body. He could feel Schwann taking over his face, trying to kill the emotions rather than deflecting them as Raven would.

"No, I'm not." Rita blurted out, face flushing scarlet. "You really want to know? I wished it had been you! I wished that it had been you, or even that bastard Schwann, because then I would have at least recognized someone."

o-o-o

Raven blinked and Rita snapped her mouth shut.

Shit shit shit shit... why had she said that? Why was she so angry with him? He'd come to get her, put himself into danger to get her out. After everything he'd done for them, for her, how could she say that?

But she didn't take it back. Instead, more came spilling out.

"At least then you would have been doing something all this time rather than just sitting on your ass while everyone else busted theirs."

Raven wasn't saying anything, just staring at her. She wished he would stop. She'd said all this before, many times, while he was in her lab and bothering her while she was trying to work, and it was all true. But for some reason, it looked like it was sinking in this time. Why now? Why right now, when it wasn't actually what she wanted to be saying?

"So you came to get me. Whoopdeedoo, thanks. It's not like you could have been helping out any number of people all these months while you were indulging in your creepy little crush on me."

_Shit._

o-o-o

If Raven's face had been blank by habit before, it froze now in genuine shock. The contents of his stomach all rolled over at once and his mouth went so dry his lips cemented together.

What... how... why did...

_Shit._

"R-Rita darlin'," he choked out past his tongue, "I have no idea what you are talking about."

He knew. He knew for certain what he had slurred that night.

_"Good night. Love ya."_

It had been a drunken slipup. Sober people did it all the time and it was an awkward chuckle all around. She couldn't pin this on him just from that utterance.

But then there was the fact that he hadn't slept in his own bed in weeks, preferring the rug in her lab.

But then there was the fact that he knew her habits well enough that he could clean up her desk while she was away and she'd never notice because everything she needed was still exactly where she would reach.

But then there was the fact that he _did _have a creepy little crush on her...

She still had a grip on his collar and her face was so damn close to his. Oh, it was creepy and it was wrong and yet he still wanted to put his forehead on hers, to see if it really was as warm as it looked, if it would burn him.

It was just a crush. She was one of the few people he trusted enough to have seen his heart – or lack thereof - she was cute as a button when she was angry, she was angry frequently, and she had more brains than most of the country combined. It was just a perfect storm of factors and all the like and respect had produced a bit of a crush.

It wasn't anything special, he wanted to explain. He'd had a crush on Judy from the moment he saw her – confident, competent, and sexy as hell – and nothing would ever come of it.

But then... he didn't spend nearly every moment of the day with Judith. Sure, part of it was that she was always off on some mission or another, but Raven and Judy never really spent much time alone together. It just didn't click. They got along, they just didn't really work together. That was it.

"No idea," he lied again, knowing that she knew he was lying.

It came out more acidic than he meant, venom dripping from his voice, but the fact that he still wanted to feel her eyelashes on his nose was seriously creeping him out. It was better when it had been suppressed.

And he realized that he was allowed to be angry _at _her as well. Hell, she'd broken his nose because of something completely harmless that she'd had an equal part in. Rita was bad at emotions, sure, but that wasn't an excuse to punch him in the nose and it wasn't an excuse for him to let her.

"If you want me to stay away, I can leave you alone." He didn't mean to be yelling, but he was pretty sure he was. "Wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable."

o-o-o

It took Rita a moment to register that he had dismissed himself and she made up for her delay in releasing him by doing it as savagely as possible. Her shove sent him a few steps back.

"Fine by me," she growled. "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."

Then she turned on her heel so she didn't have to watch his back leave.

If he'd done anything but deny her accusations, she wouldn't have thought anything of it. If he'd just joked about it or made some dramatic confession, it would just have been Raven being stupid Raven and she would have put it out of her mind. She was used to it by now.

She hadn't expected him to sputter and lie. And she knew he was lying. The spirits had been in his head and she'd been in the spirits' realm. There had been something there that had felt familiar, but she couldn't quite place it until she'd seen him standing on the edge of the crater with blood spilling out of his heart. Then she'd known, because she was pretty sure it was the same feeling she had.

But it was weird and creepy. He was old enough to be her father, and he was a complete idiot, and he didn't shave often enough. He always wore that dumb jacket and didn't seem to understand personal space and time.

And yet, she was used to having him around. He was careful with her wrenches and understood alphabetical order and he'd give her his pickles when they got their meals delivered. Even now, the lack of his presence near her was almost grating. Her head was too quiet, even with the hissing and humming and clanking of the lab. It was missing the whir of his heart, the noise that was so barely there that she was pretty sure she was imagining it most of the time.

Dammit.

And yet. He wasn't gone. She had been expecting him to... what? The realization that they were still stuck together in the room that they weren't allowed to leave dawned on her. Literally, the only place that would be separate was the bathroom. Was he going to lock himself in the bathroom? Really?

But he didn't. Instead, he turned on his heel and marched to the door. Rita felt her heart sink into her socks for reasons that she couldn't quite name or want to think about too hard as he thumped on the door.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Geez, how many times have my babies thrown up this story?_


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